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“Milner has historically been constructed as a subsidiary figure to D.W. Winnicott
within the British Independent Group. She is however a very important figure
within early- to mid-twentieth century psychoanalysis. This book provides a
concerted, careful and theoretically-engaged analysis of Milner. It is an original
work that stands to make a substantial contribution to the field of psychoanalytic
studies, literary studies, and twentieth-century cultural history.”
—Jo Winning, Professor, Birkbeck, University of London, UK
The Marion Milner Method
Psychoanalysis, Autobiography,
Creativity
Emilia Halton-Hernandez
Designed cover image: “Self-Portrait” by Marion Milner. By
permission of The Marsh Agency Ltd., on behalf of The Estate
of Marion Milner.
First published 2023
by Routledge
4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa
business
© 2023 Emilia Halton-Hernandez
The right of Emilia Halton-Hernandez to be identified as author
of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77
and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted
or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic,
mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented,
including photocopying and recording, or in any information
storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from
the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks
or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and
explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Introduction 1
PART 1
The Milner method23
PART 2
The Milner tradition121
Index 179
Illustrations
Firstly, I am grateful to Giles Milner for graciously allowing me access to his fam-
ily’s collection of Milner’s art, and for sharing with me his personal recollections
of his grandmother. My thanks to Ewan O’Neill at The British Psychoanalytical
Society Archive and the archivists at the Wellcome Collection for their assistance
with archival research. I would like to extend my gratitude to The Marsh Agency
on behalf of The Marion Milner Estate, Lynda Barry, and Riva Lehrer for gener-
ously allowing me to reproduce a number of their images and quotes in this book.
I owe a special thanks to Vicky Lebeau for her support and assiduous and
thoughtful feedback on the many drafts of this book. My thanks also to Jo Win-
ning, Hope Wolf, and Helen Tyson and the anonymous reviewers whose insights,
suggestions, and perceptive comments have helped develop this project. Thank
you to my colleagues at the University of Sussex for their unwavering support
throughout the various stages of researching and writing: Laura Gallon, Di Yang,
Aanchal Vij, Yuri Enjo, Elle J Whitcroft, Shalini Sengupta, and Hannah Davita
Ludikhuijze.
I am grateful to the editorial and production staff at Routledge, especially Zoe
Meyer and Jana Craddock for their expertise and guidance throughout the publi-
cation process.
Lastly, my deepest thanks to my parents, my sister, and Angus. Thank you for
being there for me, and with me, in so many ways, and for making this book a
possibility.
Introduction
DOI: 10.4324/9781003296720-1
2 Introduction
Milner’s work champions this site for therapeutic work over that of the relation-
ship 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 psy-
choanalysis 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 occa-
sionally, 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 auto-
biography, 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 pro-
vide 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 experimen-
tation 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 fol-
low, 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 One’s Own (1934), An Experiment in Leisure
(1937), and Eternity’s 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, dedi-
cates 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, includ-
ing 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
Introduction 3
for some time A Life of One’s Own and An Experiment in Leisure were published
under the penname of Joanna Field, driving at times a disconnect between Milner
and her works.2 Routledge’s new editions offer the reader a renewed examina-
tion 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 pub-
lished 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 Rout-
ledge) edited by Margaret Boyle Spelman and Joan Raphael-Leff is forthcoming
(November 2022) and promises discussion of Milner’s work from a range of clini-
cians and thinkers.
Milner has historically been constructed as a subsidiary figure to Winnicott
within the British Independent Group, and critical engagement with both her psy-
choanalytic 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 impor-
tant 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 dis-
tinctive 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 dedi-
cated 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 May-
nard, 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 under-
graduates admitted to Girton College, Cambridge, and became the head of West-
field 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
4 Introduction
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 obser-
vation that she would later turn to good account in chronicling observations on
herself and her inner life.3 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 learn-
ing. 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 under-
graduate degree in psychology and physiology at University College, London. It
is here that Milner first encountered the ideas of Sigmund Freud in lectures com-
paring 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 psycholo-
gist, 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 play-
wright 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 Lei-
sure (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).4 She attributes her deci-
sion 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
Introduction 5
the analysis with Winnicott, was a patient of the Kleinian Canadian analyst, Clif-
ford 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 associ-
ated with the British Independent Group, or the Middle Group, that emerged out of
the wartime Controversial Discussions. These heated disputes arose within the soci-
ety 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.
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