The Marion Milner Method

Front matter

EMILIA HALTON-HERNANDEZ

MILN

Psychoo Creati /

Contents

List of illustrations viii Acknowledgements ix Introduction 1 PART 1 The Milner method 23

1 A Life of Ones Own and the birth of a diary keeping method to rival psychoanalysis 25

2 On Not Being Able to Paint and drawing and painting for psychoanalysis 57 3 Bothered by Alligators and compensating for the failures

Introduction

This book’s cover image is a self-portrait painted by the British psychoanalyst and author Marion Milner. Dressed in the painter’s archetypal blue smock, at easel and with palette and brush at hand, Milner rests her gaze intently on the canvas as the viewer catches her in the act of creation. The painting is undated but, given the subject’s youthful appearance, was likely created during Milner’s younger years—just one iteration of the many acts of self-representation Milner produced over her lifetime across different media. This self-portrait, however, is a rare instance of a figurative, naturalistic self-portrayal. Milner’s autobiographical books, published throughout her lifetime, involve a sustained dedication to representing the vistas and contours of the inner world, rather than those of the external. And if in this self-portrait Milner’s brush strokes on her canvas are obscured from our view, visible only to the painter herself, Milner’s autobiographical books reveal to her readers in careful detail the marks she makes in order to capture an inner life. In continuity with the rest of her work, however, this self-portrait is a representation of a subject immersed in the throes of creativity and self-depiction. Here is a portrait of the artist as a young woman, and as this study will examine, it is also the portrait of a psychoanalytic thinker exploring the site of creative expression for therapeutic self-transformation.

This book traces the development of Marion Milner’s autobiographical acts throughout her lifetime, as expressed in her published work and in work now contained in her archives. It proposes that Milner is a thinker to whom we can turn to explore the therapeutic potentialities of autobiographical and creative self-expression. Specifically, this book draws out the ideas of a psychoanalytic thinker whose work proposes that autobiographical acts can provide an equivalent nurturing and attuning function to what object relations theorists understand the mother and analyst as providing infant and analysand. Milner’s autobiographical books: A Life of One s Own (1934), An Experiment in Leisure (1937), On Not Being Able to Paint (1950), Eternity s Sunrise: A Way of Keeping a Diary (1987), and the posthumously published Bothered by Alligators (2013) are read as constituting a life-long engagement with the development of a therapeutic practice located at the site of creative self-reflection.! One of the questions this study asks is whether

DOI: 10.4324/9781003296720-1 This chapter has been made available under a CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.

Milner’s work champions this site for therapeutic work over that of the relationship between patient and analyst in the psychoanalytic setting.

Milner’s work does not present itself as a unified metapsychology, cohesive theory, or methodology. Unlike Sigmund Freud’s deliberate efforts to present psychoanalysis as a distinctive science, with foundational axioms, metapsychological theories, and clinical data, Milner’s autobiographical books present a loose set of terms and methods that emerge out of the work recorded in them, and which occasionally, though not always, make the crossover into her published theoretical and clinical psychoanalytic papers and books. It is the aim of this study, however, to bring to light a theory and practice which is latent and sometimes hidden, but which is central to understanding what drives her autobiographical work. It is by doing this work of elucidation and organisation that this study finds Milner to be a thinker with a unique take on psychoanalysis, object relations theory, and autobiography, working at the interstices of each. Her experimentation with aesthetic, self-expressive techniques are a means to therapeutic ends, forming what I am calling her “autobiographical cure.”

Milner’s autobiographical books are difficult to define generically, since they are not autobiographies in the traditional sense of the term. In general, they provide very little factual detail about a life lived out in the world, and the events that form it. I understand these books as commonly defined by an experimentation with different forms of autobiographical acts for the purpose of gaining self-insight and promoting self-development. They explore various mark-making techniques that might make the inner world better known, visible for observation, and ripe for analysis. They are all written with a reader in mind, who is invited to witness Milner’s own methods for transformation, and in doing so, might want to follow her lead and engage in a similar undertaking of their own. Characterising her books as self-help handbooks with a prescriptive method for the reader to follow, would, however, be misleading. Milner serves instead as a kind of example to those like herself who might learn from her strategies for self-transformation.

Broadly speaking, A Life of Ones Own (1934), An Experiment in Leisure (1937), and Eternity 5 Sunrise: A Way of Keeping a Diary (1987) engage with written autobiographical acts in the form of free associative writing experiments and diary keeping. On Not Being Able to Paint (1950), as its title suggests, dedicates itself to forms of visual mark-making—painting, drawing, and doodling. Milner’s final book, written up until the last days of her life in 1998, Bothered by Alligators (2013), engages with all of these aesthetic acts and more, including the making of collages out of her old paintings. These books are written and published before, during, and after Milner’s long career as a full-time practicing psychoanalyst and active member of the British Psychoanalytical Society.

Milner’s work has enjoyed something of a resurgence in the last decade, thanks in particular to Emma Letley’s biography Marion Milner: The Life (2014) and her work commissioning new editions of Milner’s books with Routledge (2011-13). Milner’s books have experienced a somewhat chequered publication history: An Experiment in Leisure was blitzed out of print during the Second World War, and for some time A Life of Ones Own and An Experiment in Leisure were published under the penname of Joanna Field, driving at times a disconnect between Milner and her works.” Routledge’s new editions offer the reader a renewed examination of Milner’s work, with introductions by cultural, literary, and psychoanalytic critics including Rachel Bowlby, Maud Ellmann, Janet Sayers, Adam Phillips, Hugh Haughton, and Margaret Walters. More recently, Critical Quarterly published a special issue “Marion Milner: Modernism, Politics, Psychoanalysis” in 2021 which includes an interview with Adam Phillips and my article on Milner’s engagement with the work of artist and poet William Blake: “‘A poet of human nature’: Marion Milner’s William Blake.” At the time of writing, The Marion Milner Tradition (part of the Lines of Development Series published by Routledge) edited by Margaret Boyle Spelman and Joan Raphael-Leff is forthcoming (November 2022) and promises discussion of Milner’s work from a range of clinicians and thinkers.

Milner has historically been constructed as a subsidiary figure to Winnicott within the British Independent Group, and critical engagement with both her psychoanalytic practice and theory, as well as her autobiographical practice as an author and a painter, has been limited. The emergence of new scholarly writing on Milner’s work has gone some way towards cementing her legacy as an important contributor to psychoanalytic thought in her own right, granting her attention in the twenty-first century by scholars in psychoanalysis, but also such fields as literature, modernist studies, art history, life writing, and autobiography studies. The variety and range of scholarly attention Milner’s work has inspired has I think much to do with the unusual heterogeneity of her work and thinking.

This book seeks to make its own contribution by engaging with Milner’s distinctive search for a therapeutic cure that takes place in the relationships between pen and paper, paint and canvas. In so doing, we are introduced to a thinker dedicated to a distinctive version of object relations theory, one that attends to the relational inner world of the writer and artist.

The life

Marion Milner, née Nina Marion Blackett, was born in London on 1 February, 1900, to a middle-class English family. Her father, Arthur Blackett, worked for some time on the London Stock Exchange as a stock jobber, though as a “dreamy Victorian Romantic” with a love for nature and poetry, he was suitably unsuited for a city job (Patrick Blackett qtd. in Letley 2). Milner’s mother, Caroline Maynard, was also interested in the arts and descended from a pioneer in the field of education—her mother Constance Maynard was one of the first female undergraduates admitted to Girton College, Cambridge, and became the head of Westfield College, University of London from 1881-1913. Milner had two siblings, an older sister Winifred with whom she was not particularly close, and a preferred older brother, Patrick Blackett who went on to win a Nobel Prize in Physics in 1948. Illustrious achievements were also accompanied, however, by a difficult home life. Arthur and Caroline’s marriage was not a particularly happy one, and in 1911 when Milner was eleven years old, her father, to whom Milner was greatly attached, suffered a mental breakdown.

Milner’s earliest form of autobiographical writing was a nature diary, which at the age of eleven, was likely influenced by her father’s naturalist bent and their frequent excursions into the English countryside. Her diary entitled “Mollie Blackett’s Nature Diary” after her family nickname, records the sights and sounds of the natural world in careful detail, an early display of Milner’s powers of observation that she would later turn to good account in chronicling observations on herself and her inner life.* At seventeen Milner was forced to leave the Godolphin boarding school in Wiltshire due to lack of family funds to pay for a sixth form education. She turned to tutoring a seven-year-old boy in reading, an experience that introduced her to the ideas of Montessori and the importance of play in learning. Following this she began training at a Montessori nursery school training college, but this experience was short lived; a year later she enrolled in an undergraduate degree in psychology and physiology at University College, London. It is here that Milner first encountered the ideas of Sigmund Freud in lectures comparing the physiologist Charles Scott Sherrington’s descriptions of the functions of the nervous system with Freud’s principles of unconscious functioning. At this time, her brother Patrick also gave her a copy of Freud’s Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, though at this point in her education Milner admits to having been more taken by physiology than with psychoanalysis (HOLG xli). Following her studies, for which she received a first-class degree in 1923, Milner went on to work with the educational psychologist Cyril Burt, followed by a Laura Spelman Rockefeller Scholarship from 1927-28 studying under the Australian psychologist, Elton Mayo in Boston, USA. It is in Boston that Milner also had her first, albeit short, experience as a patient of talking therapy with the American analyst Dr Ira Putnam.

When Milner decided to undertake a psychoanalytic training in 1939, she already had a successful career as an industrial psychologist, had married playwright Dennis Milner, and was mother to a son, John. She had also undergone a period of analysis with a Jungian analyst back in England, had published two autobiographical books—A Life of One s Own (1934), and An Experiment in Leisure (1937), and written a book about research on the education system in a girl’s school, The Human Problem in Schools (1938) for the Girls Public Day School Trust (GPDST). Milner describes in detail her journey to eventually training to become a psychoanalyst at the Institute of Psychoanalysis in London in 1939, and qualification four years later in 1943, in the Preface to The Hands of the Living God: An Account of a Psycho-analytic Treatment (1969).* She attributes her decision to “begin a Freudian analysis with Sylvia Payne, and in 1939 to apply for and be accepted by the British Psycho-Analytical Society” to hearing “a public lecture, in 1938, by D.W. Winnicott” (Milner, HOLG xlvi). Winnicott would later become a close colleague of Milner’s and her analyst for a period of around four years. Milner also undertook her training analysis with Sylvia Payne, and after the analysis with Winnicott, was a patient of the Kleinian Canadian analyst, Clifford Scott. In the course of her training and post qualification work she received clinical supervision for her work with patients from Melanie Klein, Joan Riviere, and Ella Sharpe, all significant figures in the British Psychoanalytic Society at the time.

Milner’s thinking and her professional alliances were, and still are, most associated with the British Independent Group, or the Middle Group, that emerged out of the wartime Controversial Discussions. These heated disputes arose within the society between Melanie Klein and Anna Freud about early infantile mentation, clinical technique, child development, and Freudian apostasy. The Independent Group, as its name implies, saw itself as non-aligned, taking on the role of ad hoc moderators for the two factions. Along with Milner, its members would come to include figures such as Sylvia Payne, Ella Sharpe, Donald Winnicott, and Michael Balint.

After Milner’s death in 1998, close friend and cultural critic Margaret Walters describes the impression made on her by one of Milner’s paintings hung in her house in Provost Road (Figure 0.1), and how well it symbolised

Figure 0.1 “The Hens” by Marion Milner. Giles Milner’s personal collection.

Source: By permission of The Marsh Agency Ltd., on behalf of The Estate of Marion Milner.

Milner’s place within the analytic community. Walters describes the large painting as a:

rather sumptuous canvas in varying shades of deep, dark, rich reds; in a way, it was a trick painting—at a second glance, it arranged itself into farmyard scene: two hens aggressively confronting each other over a tiny egg. Marion would take any new visitor to look at the painting and announce that it was about Melanie Klein and Anna Freud squabbling over who’d given birth to the British Psycho-Analytical Society.

Milner as a painter seems to situate herself as an outside observer of these squabbling subjects, removed from the political factions they spearheaded. With Klein as a supervisor, and Anna Freud providing a foreword to her book On Not Being Able to Paint, she seems, however, to have managed a productive working relationship with analysts from both camps. Milner was also a regular member of the Imago Group founded by the art critic Adrian Stokes, a group broadly revolving around the thinking of Melanie Klein that met regularly to discuss psychoanalysis and its relations with art (members also included post-Kleinian thinkers, such as Wilfred R. Bion, Donald Meltzer, and Roger Money-Kyrle). As a visual counterpoint to the squabbling hens, a linocut of Milner’s from 1960 depicts a lone chicken in starlight, a vision more representative perhaps of Milner’s independent, intermediary, and non-partisan position within the psychoanalytic world (Figure 0.2).

Milner published several psychoanalytic papers that found their way into the journals and annals of psychoanalysis; most of these papers were published in the collection The Supressed Madness of Sane Men: Forty-Four Years of Exploring Psychoanalysis (1987). This book shows, however, that despite Milner’s wide-ranging psychoanalytic influences, her analytic preoccupations were closest to those of Winnicott. Milner was in “continuing dialogue” with Winnicott throughout much of her career, and her 1972 paper “Winnicott and the Two-way Journey” provides an example of their shared interests around thinking about creativity and psychic health (Caldwell and Joyce 249). Like Winnicott, Milner disagreed with Klein’s notion that the infant had an innate, or at the very least an early awareness of a rudimentary self and a fleeting awareness of object separateness, and agreed that the illusion of oneness with the mother better described the earliest stages of infantile psychic life.* Contemporary scholarship suggests this disagreement is more a matter of emphasis than clear difference of view, but in Milner’s day it was a hotly disputed issue upon which a theory of technique and therapeutic efficacy depended, for example, in whether narcissistic states of withdrawal were considered pathological or of developmental necessity.

Autobiography and psychoanalysis

In the introduction to The Suppressed Madness of Sane Men: Forty-Four Years of Exploring Psychoanalysis and the Preface to her earlier case study The Hands of the Living God, Milner provides the reader with an autobiographical account of her

Figure 0.2 Linocut by Marion Milner, 1960. Marion Milner's own art. P01-H- A. Marion Milner collection, Archives of the British Psychoanalytical Society.

Source: By permission of The Marsh Agency Ltd., on behalf of The Estate of Marion Milner.‘ professional analytic life not unlike the one I have sketched here (more similar perhaps to Freud’s “periautobiography,” his account of his professional life in An Autobiographical Study (1927) than what he came to see as his “true autobiography,” The Interpretation of Dreams (1899) and its account of his inner life (Marcus, Sigmund Freud s The Interpretation of Dreams: New Interdisciplinary Essays 55)). Milner’s self-portraits of the psychoanalyst as a young woman, however, do hint at the development of a different therapeutic endeavour taking place alongside, as well as influencing, her analytic career. In The Hands of the Living God she tells the reader how:

in 1926 I had tried to experiment with “free association’ writing, putting down whatever came into my head. .. . The results, both of this and the diary, were an immense surprise to me, as I have described in that first book. There was now no escaping from the fact that Freud was right, that there was a part of my mind the working of which I was totally unaware of.

lii)

From here she “developed a belief in the value of diaries” (xliii). It is free associative writing and diary keeping that is ultimately attributed with providing the first real proof of the unconscious at work inside of her, and that proves Freud right. Here then, Milner introduces another route to psychological insight, one that takes place at the site of diary keeping, the self in dialogue with the self. It gestures to another, parallel, but distinctive career trajectory that follows her through her life and that this book is committed to tracing: the development of her autobiographical cure. The publication of Eternity 5 Sunrise: A Way of Keeping a Diary in 1987, the same year as Milner published The Suppressed Madness of Sane Men, offers a particularly striking picture of a thinker engaged in both a psychoanalytic and autobiographical enterprise—enterprises that are at the same time congruent, but also separate projects.

Milner’s autobiographical cure therefore takes place at the crossroads between psychoanalysis and autobiographical mark-making. The relationship between psychoanalysis and autobiography has long gripped critics in the fields of psychoanalysis, life-writing, and beyond, with the genesis of each understood as intimately intertwined. Augustine’s Confessions, written between AD 397 and 400 is widely considered as the first (known) Western autobiography ever written, and the first form of proto-psychoanalytic thinking, a “manifesto for the unexpected, hidden qualities of the inner world—the conscientia” (Brown 205). And what is considered Freud’s “true autobiography,” The Interpretation of Dreams, has now been understood as an autobiographical endeavour that set into motion the psychoanalytic movement. Derrida’s well-known question: “How can an autobiographical writing, in the abyss of an unterminated self-analysis, give to a worldwide institution its birth?” ascribes Freud’s autobiographical writing with the utmost significance and impact (qtd. in Forrester 43). In this view, psychoanalysis seems to have needed autobiography in order to give birth to itself.

Like Milner, Freud was a prolific life writer—a writer of autobiography and self-analysis (An Interpretation of Dreams), a writer and reader of letters, and in later life at the age of 73 also a diary keeper, recording in what is now known as The Diary of Sigmund Freud, 1929-1939: A Record of the Final Decade (1992) the major personal and world events of this period. Ultimately, however, Freud was dedicated to the development, theory, and practice of psychoanalysis, his “talking cure” for the exploration of self and psyche and for the treatment of neurosis. Fundamentally, the insights made by the autobiographical “writing cure” of his dream-book were used in the service of developing a therapeutic technique that takes place in the encounter between analyst and patient.

As both autobiography and psychoanalysis involve a practice of self-telling, critics from the fields of literature and psychoanalysis have closely explored how the aims of psychoanalysis as theory and practice, and autobiography as literary genre, might overlap and interconnect (Marcus “Autobiography and Psychoanalysis” 257). Adam Philips in his piece “The Telling of Selves: Notes on Psychoanalysis and Autobiography” (1994) observes how “psychoanalysis is clearly akin to autobiography in the sense that it involves a self-telling, and the belief that there is nowhere else to go for the story of our lives” (Phillips 69). The psychoanalyst Charles Rycroft in his 1983 essay “On Autobiography” draws out their similarities further, suggesting the analyst might be called the “assistant autobiographer” to his patient, the work of finding and constructing the patient’s life story a joint narrative enterprise produced from the psychoanalytic relationship (Rycroft qtd. in Marcus, “Autobiography and Psychoanalysis” 259).

Nevertheless, both Phillips and Rycroft recognise the ultimate irreconcilability of autobiography and psychoanalysis. These break points include Phillips’ sense that psychoanalysis is more appropriately considered a precursor to autobiography since the aim of analysis “is not to recover the past, but to make recovery of the past possible, the past that is frozen in repetition; and in this sense psychoanalysis might be more of a prelude to autobiography” (Phillips 69). Laura Marcus finds that despite their affinities, there is “not enough to create a symmetry between the two practices, and from the early twentieth century onwards there has been a sense of missed opportunities and failed relationships” (Auto/biographical Discourses 214). Ultimately, the “projects of psychoanalysis and autobiography, while having some important connections, miss each other at a number of crucial junctures” (Marcus, “Autobiography and Psychoanalysis” 261). Milner’s autobiographical cure, with its searching for how autobiographical acts can do something psychoanalytic, does, I think, open new ways for thinking about the connections between psychoanalysis and autobiography.

The links between psychoanalysis and autobiography have also been considered in relation to the proliferation of psychoanalysts’ autobiographical writing and patients’ autobiographical accounts of their experiences on the couch. These are the “two broad genres” that Maud Ellmann suggests “psychoanalytic autobiographies may be grouped into” (“Psychoanalysis and Autobiography” 314). Those by analysts include Ernest Jones’s Free Associations: Memories of a Psychoanalyst (1958), Wilfred Bion’s The Long Week-End 1897-1919: Part of a Life (1982), a reminiscence of the first twenty-one years of Bion’s life, and later 4/1 My Sins Remembered: Another Part of a Life and the Other Side of Genius (1985). In the second group we might include Joseph Wortis’s record of his analysis with Freud beginning in 1934, Fragments of an Analysis with Freud (1954) and H.D.’s (Hilda Doolittle) Tribute to Freud (1956). Milner’s autobiographical books, particularly Bothered by Alligators, straddle both camps in their providing autobiographical explorations from the perspective of the psychoanalyst as well as the psychoanalytic patient. But Milner’s work I think also opens a third category of psychoanalytic autobiography for consideration: one in which autobiographical writing is used to do something specifically and explicitly psychoanalytic.

Discussion around psychoanalysis and autobiography has also tackled how psychoanalysis and its conception of the self as containing multiple selves and objects in a dynamic relation to one another profoundly disrupted the autobiographical subject’s sense of possessing a unified “T” in the twentieth century and beyond. This has inspired autobiographies where the self is conceived at the very outset as fragmented and multiple. Lyndsey Stonebridge’s “Taking care of ourselves and looking after the subject: Marion Milner’s autobiographical acts” (1994) explicitly questions what a psychoanalytically informed autobiography involves in relation to Milner’s self-analytic work. Stonebridge asks:

If, as psychoanalysis tells us, the subject is motivated by the unconscious, by another scene unmasterable by self-reflection, then immediately the autobiographical imperative to represent a unified self would be called into question by such an exercise. It follows that an autobiography written with psychoanalytic hindsight would not attempt to speak in the voice of an authentic self but rather, surrendering to the unconscious determinants of writing, would reveal the manifest fictions of a “subject in process.”

Meg Harris Williams’s approach to the connections between psychoanalysis and autobiography in “On psychoanalytic autobiography” (2012) focuses on the shared emotional effects provided by autobiography and psychoanalysis, an approach closer to the focus of this study. Specifically, autobiography and psychoanalysis are understood as providing the writer or patient with a way of finding out their identity. Harris Williams understands “autobiography as a particular mode of writing which, like psychoanalysis, attempts to answer the question posed so simply and eloquently by King Lear: ‘Who is it that can tell me who I am?’” (398). Moreover, Harris Williams proposes that Bion’s definition of psychoanalysis as a means of introducing the patient to himself might also be used as a definition for autobiography (Harris Williams 398). Harris’s understanding here resonates with autobiography scholar Phillipe Lejeune’s estimation that “Identity is the real starting point of autobiography” (“Le pacte autobiographique” 24) and that “Autobiography is a discourse on the self in which the question, “who am I?’ is answered by a narrative that tells ‘how I became who I am’” (124). The notion that autobiography might help constitute a sense of self and identity in the same way the psychoanalytic relationship does is at the heart of Milner’s autobiographical project.

Building upon this existing work on psychoanalysis and its links with autobiography, this book hopes to introduce Milner and her method as providing a new approach to the relationship between psychoanalysis and autobiography: one that we shall see sometimes positions the therapeutic work of autobiography as a rival to psychoanalysis, as an influence and accompaniment to psychoanalytic practice, and at other times as a corrective for the failed experience of being a patient of psychoanalysis.

Legacies

Milner’s legacy within the psychoanalytic world reflects her interest in these two therapeutic endeavours. The psychoanalyst and past president of the British Psychoanalytical Society, Donald Campbell, when asked by Milner’s autobiographer Emma Letley in 2008 to comment upon her place in the history of psychoanalysis stated plainly that “Milner was more artist than analyst and thus difficult to fit in psychoanalytically” (Campbell qtd. in Letley 152). “The psychoanalytic establishment,” Letley concurs, “does not really know what to make of her, what to do with her” (166). The analyst Simon Grolnick considers her status as a “misfit” or maverick more favourably, suggesting that her “artistic inclinations” ultimately meant she “could not accept any rigidities within a fixed psychoanalytic movement” (295). Grolnick adds that the fact that “she rode out the next 44 years within psychoanalysis is a tribute both to Milner and to the psychoanalytic movement” (293). Milner herself seems to have enjoyed this insider-outsider status, resisting categorisation and total inclusion. Margaret Walters writes how “though she committed her life to it, Marion could take a healthily sceptical—indeed, very mischievous—attitude towards psychoanalytic orthodoxy” (131). Milner’s unusual legacy as an analyst is, I think, well captured in a review by Rosemary Dinnage of The Suppressed Madness of Sane Men for the Times Literary Supplement, where she writes how “Milner was an original writer before she became an analyst and she has integrated her self-explorations into her psychoanalytic work. Among analysts that is rare if not unique” (Dinnage qtd. in Fielding 65). Milner’s work cannot, it seems, be easily contained within a purely psychoanalytic framework. It is her self-explorations at the site of autobiography before but also during her career as a psychoanalyst, and its influence on her psychoanalytic work, that we shall see resists the conventions of the psychoanalytic canon, or, indeed, of any other canon.’

Increasing attention to Milner’s work from scholars outside of psychoanalysis has begun to open up new ways of approaching her work. Vanessa Smith and Helen Tyson have placed Milner’s work within the context of modernist experimentation. In her article “Transferred debts: Marion Milner’s A Life of Ones Own and the limits of analysis” (2018), Smith emphasises the connections between a young Milner and the Bloomsbury Group, describing A Life of Ones Own as “an elusive critical object” which “sidles up to and then shies away from the two dominant discourses through which selfhood was rethought between the wars— psychoanalysis and Modernism” (Smith 96). Helen Tyson’s article “ ‘Catching butterflies’: Marion Milner and stream of consciousness writing” (2020) presents new findings from Milner’s unpublished diaries and notebooks that sheds further light on the influence of modernist authors’ experiments with stream of consciousness writing and Milner’s own writing experiments. Mary Jacobus’s The Poetics of Psychoanalysis: In the Wake of Klein (2005) also provides a literary critic’s view of object relations theory, with Jacobus attending to the literary and aesthetic dimensions of Milner’s clinical work recorded in The Hands of the Living God. Jo Winning’s chapter “Love and the Art Object” in Modernism and Affect (2015)

considers Milner’s theories about creativity in relation to the “affect of production” of the lesbian modernist art object (112).

In his introduction to the 2013 edition of Eternity’s Sunrise, Hugh Haughton places the book within a twentieth-century literary tradition influenced by psychoanalysis that, like H.D.’s Memoir of Freud and D.H. Lawrence’s Fantasia of the Unconscious, offers a “fundamentally poetic take on the new Freudian unconscious” (xx). For Haughton, Milner’s work is a “maverick take on psychoanalytic theory and her interest in art as it is created by or seen by people who are not ‘artists,’ art historians or psychoanalysts” (xxi). This book continues the work of these scholars, exploring Milner’s distinctive project for its investments in the domains of the psychoanalytic, literary, and aesthetic. It seeks to draw out the methods and theories Milner develops to procure for herself something like a psychoanalytic cure at the site of autobiographical and aesthetic experimentation.

Seeking the maternal provision

As Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams is seen to “embody ‘the person’ of Freud” in contrast to “the ‘impersonality’” of An Autobiographical Study, Milner’s autobiographical books provide us with insight into her emotional life and self-development (Marcus, Sigmund Freud s The Interpretation of Dreams: New Interdisciplinary Essays, 44). Her final book, Bothered by Alligators, expands the parameters of autobiographical reflection to include that of her early life, and she comes to consider a Winnicottian perspective on her own formation. In her eighties, Milner learns an important biographical detail about her experience of being breastfed that prompts a deeper understanding of her early life. She states in an interview how “in the 80s, my mother told something I had never known: that she had weaned me at four months because she had a breast abscess. So I had to think about everything in my past in a totally new way, starting again from the beginning. But one always has to do that” (Milner qtd. in Hopkins 242). In Bothered by Alligators she wonders about the implications of this experience for her adult emotional life: