Getting Better

Abstract This chapter opens with the question of what art and psychoanalysis might have to do with each other, by looking at Milner’s interest in Cézanne. It then turns to Milner’s work as a therapist and psychoanalyst, and it brings together the reflections on attention and mediation from the previous chapters in order to who how she developed a clinical practice from them. It situates Milner’s originality in the context of her peers like D.W. Winnicott and Michael Balint, in order to focus on Milner’s question about the way a creative life makes ‘use’ of the world – and also addresses a question that many people who come to psychoanalysis ask: ‘what’s the use’ in living? These questions are explored directly via some of Milner’s most significant case histories of her therapeutic work. Particular attention is paid to the uses of drawing in Milner’s book-length account of a lengthy psychoanalytic treatment, The Hands of the Living God (1969).