Marion Milner

Abstract This book provides an introduction to, and a reading of, the work of the twentieth-century essayist, artist and psychoanalyst, Marion Milner. It explains her life’s project in seeking a ‘life of one’s own,’ and a way of living that Milner felt really to be hers and not handed to her or forced upon her by others. The project traces Milner’s own response to the challenge of creatively relating to the world around her, as she experimented with diary writing, drawing and painting, and in psychotherapy. It is structured in three sections: Reading, Drawing and Getting Better, and it models a way of reading inspired by Milner’s experiment. The central claim of the book is that Milner offers two major propositions about the creative life. The first of these is about attention, and the way it is practised creatively. The second is about mediation, which means the way we shape, and are shaped by, the forms and materials of our lives. The book analyses how Milner’s own techniques of writing and drawing make room for creative experience, as well as the ways she fostered that experience in her clinical work with patients. Finally, the book positions Milner in relation to her important contexts in the histories of literature, art, and philosophy, and in relation to major psychoanalytic thinkers in Britain, like Melanie Klein and Donald Woods Winnicott.