Where the Bomb Falls

The psychoanalyst​ Marion Milner was born with the 20th century. She was the youngest child of a middling-posh family: meadow at the bottom of the Surrey garden, nannies, ponies, boarding school, a stint training as a Montessori teacher and in 1924 the award of a first-class degree in psychology from University College London. She was 26 in December 1926 when, feeling obscurely dissatisfied with her life, she decided to keep a diary in which she tried to establish ‘a method for discovering one’s true likes and dislikes’ by noting down ‘what kinds of experience made me happy’.

The method was:

(a) to pick out those moments in my daily life which had been particularly happy and to try to record them in words.

(b) To go over these records in order to see whether I could discover any rules about the conditions in which happiness occurred.

It was a scientific experiment. Her conclusions were to be based on the observation of facts, even if those facts turned out to have the character of feelings. At the time Milner was gathering information on industrial productivity in her day job as a psychologist with Cyril Burt (famous for his research on hereditary IQ). She was perfectly at home with the idea that human behaviour could be analysed systematically, and particularly interested in the application of Piaget’s ideas about child learning and development to industrial psychology. In 1927 she got herself transferred for a year to Harvard Business School, to work with Elton Mayo on the Hawthorne experiments into workplace productivity. But sibling rivalry was also at work. In 1925 her brother, Patrick Blackett, had become the first person deliberately to transmute one element into another, by firing alpha particles into nitrogen atoms in a laboratory in Cambridge. (He was later awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics.) Milner’s research was arguably just as ambitious. She wanted to use scientific methods to analyse the inner workings of the self, to access the ‘direct sense of what was real in my internal universe’.

The problem she wanted to solve in her diary was her own ‘blind fumbling with existence’, and by publishing it as a book she hoped it might be useful for other fumblers too. Long before she began the diary, she had found herself writing notes on scraps of paper and the backs of envelopes (‘I was surprised at the vehemence of some of these effusions’) in which she described ‘the feeling of being cut off from other people, separate, shut away from whatever might be real in living’. ‘I was not aware of being miserable,’ she explained, ‘for I never read through these notes, I simply wrote them in response to some blind impulse. But gradually they seem to have led me to realise that something was the matter.’

Nervous that the diary would simply encourage her tendency to wallow in a ‘bog of introspection’, she also recognised that without an element of self-centredness she would continue to be ‘swept in all directions by influence from custom, tradition, fashion, swayed by standards uncritically accepted from my friends, my family, my countrymen, my ancestors’. She was trying to shape a modernist break with her own past.

According to the code I had absorbed from childhood, to be dubbed selfish was the worst thing I knew … I do not think I ever critically considered just what I meant by unselfishness, but now the word awakens a picture of continual restlessness in which someone is always half rising from the most comfortable chair in the room and saying: ‘Do sit here.’

Instead of a lifetime of polite self-effacement, ‘I want to feel I have “lived”,’ she wrote, and immediately squirmed at this ‘Sunday paperish … nonsense’. But she continued: ‘I want to let go, to lose myself, my soul, what does it mean, to feel life pulsing through me, the big tides sweeping in, till I’m one with the immense surging fullness of the sea: and when it ebbs I would be clear and cool, washed free from stinking garbage and stagnant foetid water.’

Faced with these ‘astonishing’ desires, she considered various alternatives for encountering what she called the real. She could perhaps go ‘into the slums and forget myself in trying to lessen the troubles of others’ but doubted she had much to offer; she could set out ‘to live in the underworld. But here caution and cowardice prevailed’; she could try taking a lover but baulked at the fear of being ‘outcast from the family, of being found out in sin’. Or she could take the way out that other women of her class and background had done, and try to access the big tide within.

When the diary-book was published in 1934 (under the pseudonym Joanna Field), Milner chose the title A Life of One’s Own, signalling not so much a debt to as an upgrade on Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. (She opted for Dorothy Richardson and H.G. Wells for the epigraphs to her second diary book, An Experiment in Leisure, on ‘what to do with one’s spare time’, published three years later.) The Woolf Milner quotes in the diary is not A Room of One’s Own but her essay on Montaigne, with its celebration of ‘the life within us’ that by no means accords with the person we present in public, and it is Montaigne who provides the epigraph to the book’s final chapter, counselling against ‘the condition of living by reference to others’. She is fond of Montaigne-like distinctions between ‘knowing something intellectually and knowing it as a “lived” experience’. ‘I tried to learn not from reason but from my senses,’ she explains, and seeks to understand her life ‘not as the slow shaping of achievement to fit my preconceived purposes, but as the gradual discovery and growth of a purpose which I did not know’.

In 2010 Routledge began reissuing the diary books, alongside Milner’s later self-analysis, On Not Being Able to Paint (first published in 1950), and an account of her 16-year psychoanalytic treatment of a patient she called Susan, The Hands of the Living God (1969). There’s a biography of Milner by the analyst Emma Letley, published in 2014, and a recent crop of books and articles about how to use Milner in our daily lives: Emilia Halton-Hernandez’s The Marion Milner Method, David Russell’s Marion Milner: On Creativity and Akshi Singh’s In Defence of Leisure, forthcoming this spring, which is described as a book about ‘experiments in living with Marion Milner’.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that most of these books and the introductions to Milner’s reissued works are written by people working in literature or literature-adjacent university departments. They all tell broadly the same story. Milner is the writer we need because she believed in the importance of creative fulfilment (the ‘genius’ inside every one of us) and offered a kind of manual for finding it. From her earliest self-experiments through decades of psychoanalytic practice she took seriously the need to feel ‘real in living’, and tried to theorise the therapeutic potential of aesthetic experience, however minimal (painting even if you don’t know how to paint, for example, or simply learning to absorb one’s surroundings with ‘wide’ and receptive rather than narrowly purposive attention). ‘Milner stimulates some radical thoughts,’ Russell writes. ‘Once the conditions of survival are established, maybe there is nothing so important for feeling alive in our ordinary lives as aesthetic judgment? She makes one wonder if the basis of any usable ideas of mental health is to be found in a kind of description … of what it is we find beautiful, and what it is that brings us joy.’

The Milner method is attractive because it is rooted in everyday and amateur practices of reading, writing, drawing and (maybe not quite so everyday) psychoanalysing, and yet promises transcendence. Milner is at ease dropping in references to Keats’s negative capability, Blake’s illustrations of the Book of Job, and the Satany bits of the Bible. She is happy to daydream and to doodle and to remind us that what we are doing when we find substitutes for things, like the absent mother, is seeking the familiar in the unfamiliar, as Wordsworth said the poets do.

One reason for Milner’s current popularity is that she lived for such a long time. She died in 1998 and all the books about her quote conversations she was having in her nineties, offering a kind of telephone line to the psychoanalysts with whom she collaborated in the 1940s and 1950s, and who mostly died in the 1960s and 1970s. She was analysed by Sylvia Payne, Donald Winnicott and Clifford Scott; supervised by Joan Riviere, Ella Sharpe and Melanie Klein; and she was in the room during the Controversial Discussions to sort out the institutional rivalry between Klein and Anna Freud. But her writing reaches much further back, to an Edwardian version of English romanticism. Her taste in art and poetry was stamped by her upbringing, so that in reading her we are absorbing the (suitably housetrained) Protestant romantic tradition in which she was educated. In The Hands of the Living God she describes the task of reaching maturity as like Blake’s ‘Angel that presided o’er my birth’: growing up requires ‘the capacity to set up inside one the fantasy of containing parents who love each other and can be conceived of as creating, in an act of joy and mirth’.

At its worst this gets expressed in the diary entries as off-the-peg sublimity, the Sunday paperish flourishes Milner deplored, which also infect some of the people who write about her. But her more deliberate style (in haircuts and clothes, which she cared a lot about, as well as writing) was brisk and matter of fact. You can imagine her reading Freud, Piaget, D.H. Lawrence or the first chapter of Ulysses (she mentions only the first chapter) and laying them aside to lunch with a friend in Lyons Corner House or to meet Mrs Dalloway on the bus going down Oxford Street. Her advocates celebrate her jargon-free mix of ordinary language logic and surreal creativity – Russell makes the comparison with Alice in Wonderland. Her books do a version of psych0analysis but are reassuringly not-French, not-German and (although she was supervised by Klein) not-at-all-Austrian.

Reading Milner’s first two books I too found it hard not to fall a bit in love with her. She’s so obviously telling the truth. She includes embarrassing entries in which all she is concerned about is how she looks (‘I’ve discovered where a great part of my thought goes. I was thinking about my new frock and red shoes’; ‘I was quite dismayed to discover the depths of my own self-absorption’). She is intimate in a discreet kind of way: ‘I like the smooth roundness of my body in the bath but would like someone else to like it.’ She skips over sex (and there is almost nothing, in all her work, about physical desire), yet manages to convey the unhappiness of her marriage without betraying confidences. She discovers that taking up the habit of free or ‘automatic’ writing not only changes the nature of her day-to-day experience, lighting up ‘new possibilities in what I had seen’, but gives her access to memories she didn’t know she had. She speculates that she has two selves: a ‘deliberate’ one, who concerns herself with the present, and ‘another which answered when I let my thought be automatic’ and who is ‘busy with happenings in my remote past’.

These are odd books, the result of Milner’s desire to be a writer without knowing what to write about (‘I want to write books, to see them printed and bound’) and the best thing about them is the not-knowing. That doesn’t come easily. There is a tension in all her writing between her psychological training – not only a belief in a developmental theory of behaviour, but a conviction that this development can be measured – and her sense of the vagaries of the unconscious. She wants to hang on to the value of dreaming and the purposelessness of ‘wide attention’, but she can’t let go of the need for progress. Everything is a stage on the path to greater understanding. She keeps putting experience to the test, laying down markers that she hopes will lead from one experiment in reading or thinking or doodling to the next, in effect infusing wide attention with the purpose that undermines its value. She records her own stages of enlightenment with words like ‘still’ and ‘not yet’: ‘I was most surprised’; ‘I had still not understood.’ She acknowledges that her life conforms to a purpose she does not (yet) know, but she doesn’t seriously doubt that she will discover it. ‘I could not see that [the diary entries] had brought me much further, for I did not yet understand that every attempt to formulate desires, however incoherent, is a step forward.’ Her faith in a cure was central to her work as a psychoanalyst, of course. The basis of treatment is a belief in progress. But for me these are books to go to for the fumbling, not for the way out.

In​ 1938 Milner attended a lecture by Winnicott in which he described the ‘spatula game’ he liked to play with patients at his clinic at Paddington Green. He left a spatula within reach of a baby and, as she related it, ‘watched for variations in the normal pattern of reaching for it, grabbing it, giving it a good suck and then chucking it away. He told how, out of this very simple experimental situation, he could work out, according to the observed blocks in the various stages, a diagnosis of the problems between the mother and the baby.’ It was this account of observed play that convinced Milner to ask Winnicott to analyse her husband, Dennis Milner (Dennis suffered from severe asthma and analysts could be chary about ‘tackling an asthmatic’, as Adrian Stephen, Virginia Woolf’s brother, had put it when he refused to take him on), and then to begin a training analysis with Sylvia Payne the following year. The training was ‘rushed through’, she later said, because so many analysts were away doing war and war-adjacent work, including Winnicott himself, who was developing his theory of the importance of the ‘ordinary devoted mother’ in his research with child evacuees in Oxfordshire.

This was a period of tremendous optimism in British psychoanalytic circles. Psychic health was going to be part of the great democratic transformation of wartime and postwar civil society. The major figures in British psychoanalysis were working in social welfare institutions such as Paddington Green Children’s Hospital, girls’ schools, hostels for evacuees and the Hampstead War Nurseries, Anna Freud’s foster home for children of single-parent families. Psychoanalysis would in the future be for everyone, including very ill (not merely neurotic) patients, and would play its part in making good citizens of them – caring, responsible, ‘alive’, and maybe even whole. But the dearth of analysts in wartime meant that in practice psychoanalysis was for the very few, and those few ended up analysing one another.

They were endlessly in and out of one another’s houses. In 1943 Klein asked Milner, whose practice she was supervising, to take on her 11-year-old grandson Michael (the boy known as Simon in Milner’s 1952 case study on symbol formation), who was ‘suffering from a loss of talent for schoolwork’. Klein neither recused herself from supervising the analysis, nor held back her disapproval of Milner’s interpretation of what was going on with the boy: Milner believed that what Michael was expressing in his play was not so much (or not only) internal conflict but aesthetic pleasure. Klein’s nosiness was uncool, if not unethical, but it was nothing compared to Milner’s tortured personal-professional relationship with Winnicott.

From early in the war Winnicott’s sessions with Dennis took place at the Milners’ home in Belsize Park. Letley explains that Winnicott believed at the time in physical ‘holding’ and in what he called ‘management’ of patients, so that he was almost permanently on call. One weekend when Dennis’s asthma was particularly acute he visited the house thirteen times. Then, when Milner asked for advice on a change of analyst for herself, Winnicott suggested he could take her on too, and that to save everyone time he could hold these sessions in her home too. As if this wasn’t odd enough – Dr Winnicott bounding up the stairs to offer consultations to first Mr and then Mrs – he asked Milner to take on the young patient who would become known as Susan, who was then living in his house.

It was bound to end in disaster, and it did. Susan had been rescued by Winnicott’s wife, Alice, from a psychiatric hospital where she had recently undergone two sessions of ECT, after which, Susan explained to Milner, ‘she had no feelings and nothing mattered any more.’ She had lost her soul, she said, and ‘the world was no longer outside her.’ (She became terrified during the Little Blitz of January 1944 because ‘as she had now lost the feeling of outside space … there was nowhere else for the bomb to fall except on her, since everything was her.’) Milner’s task was to help her regain her sense of reality, an awareness of the difference between in here and out there.

Susan was 22 when Alice found her. According to Winnicott, his wife had taken an interest in her ‘because she was so beautiful … She looked like the Botticelli Venus rising from the waves.’ She reminded Milner of Garbo in Queen Christina. I rather doubt that if she had been plain she would have been plucked from the hospital. Alice seems to have presented her husband with a surrogate daughter to look after (their marriage of more than 25 years was, apparently, unconsummated). In passing her over for analysis, Winnicott assured Milner that ‘the main treatment would be the fact that he and his wife were providing her with a home’: the Winnicotts’ house in Hampstead would be the holding environment. In effect, they were taking on the role of the good-enough parents (Winnicott was paying for the analysis) and Milner was asked to act as therapeutic support, a kind of third parent – except that the Milners were also in analysis with Winnicott, which made everyone rivalrous siblings.

As it turned out, the Winnicotts could not provide a good-enough foster home. Their marriage was in crisis. Donald had been having an affair with Clare Britton, a sociologist with whom he worked on the evacuee programme in Oxfordshire, and whom he later married. But he had also been writing to Milner: ‘I could not have too much of you … as I cannot eat you, I shall probably want to choose from among the possibilities which leave life manageable as a going concern.’ (After one session in her home he left behind, for her to discover, a figure of a broken crucifix made out of matchsticks – behaviour which surely qualifies as professional misconduct and for which I can’t find a better description than humblebrag.) In 1947 Susan had another breakdown and it was clear to Milner that she could ‘no longer manage the situation of having to analyse Susan in her temporary breakdown at the same time as being Winnicott’s patient’. To her credit she realised that she could not abandon Susan, so she found her patient another place to live, and ended her own analysis, crying through the whole of the last session.

In her account of Susan’s treatment Milner explains that her own ongoing experiments with drawing outlines, boundaries and overlapping edges, recorded in On Not Being Able to Paint, seemed to illuminate her patient’s difficulties in a way that was useful to both of them:

In the book I used my own lifelong struggle to learn how to paint as material from which to seek to clarify certain theoretical issues, including some to do with the relation between the will and the imagination, and also about the problem of how the external world does come to be felt as real, separate, and ‘out there’ for any of us. So when my patient Susan arrived, in 1943, to tell me that she had ‘broken down into reality’ (at the age of 22), and also discovered, for the first time, that ‘things get further away as you walk away from them,’ but that she had lost all this, both the sense of the reality of the world and of herself in the world, after having had the ECT, I was all ears to try and understand what had happened.

I did not know then that Susan was eventually to produce doodle drawings herself and to do this quite spontaneously, for I had neither suggested it nor did she know about my book, since I had not been able to find a publisher till 1950.

Milner’s champions reproduce this account of Susan’s doodles without question. But it seems to me most unlikely to be true in the way that Milner presents it. She had been thinking and writing about drawing since the beginning of the war, and spending at least some of her holidays at a painting school in Suffolk; Alice Winnicott was a painter and ceramicist; Donald Winnicott used the squiggle game (a kind of managed invitation to doodle) in his analytic practice with children. There was plenty of polite back and forth over who began doodle-analysis and I doubt that Susan could have been unaware of it as she passed between the households.

The disturbing thought is that Susan may have felt she had to draw to be taken seriously as a patient. She brought to her analyst what she believed the analyst wanted. By 1950 she was arriving at each session with up to ninety drawings. And true to her method, Milner decided that the drawings functioned as ‘some sort of substitute mirror that her own mother had never been able to be for her’. Later she claimed that her own drawing of two jugs with their edges overlapping ‘foreshadowed, for me, the image of overlapping circles made many years later by my patient Susan, an image which had, still later, become a kind of flag or model for my own thinking about my work with patients and with myself’.

The logic here stemmed from Milner’s belief in the importance of the early infant environment which provides the basis for our experience of the world, and ourselves, as real. Susan was deprived of this environment as a child but she could use art as a therapeutic tool – as a version of what Winnicott called ‘transitional phenomena’ and Milner described as the ‘framed gap’, the space where we can play with the overlapping boundaries between inner and outer reality, between ourselves and the world outside us. When a good-enough parent is absent, the child becomes creative – she makes one thing stand in for another. So the baby’s blanket, her transitional object, is a kind of metaphor, both created and found. Milner’s faith in absent-minded creativity as a way of testing the boundary between me and not-me was rooted in an optimistic and admirably democratic theory of mental health. But there’s a gloomy inflexibility to Milner’s insistence that an adult’s doodles are a substitute for the absent or not-good-enough mother. One of the ‘central’ memories that Susan brought to Milner at the beginning of the analysis (and the first thing she thought of when she came round from the ECT) was of being sexually abused by an old man, a neighbour who used to beckon for her through the window, from the age of about four. The abuse barely features in the analysis. By the time I finished reading The Hands of the Living God, I was feeling very, very sorry for Susan.

Idon’t​ doubt Milner’s good faith – her sincere dedication to helping a patient who was in real trouble – and she wasn’t responsible for the mess Winnicott was traipsing up the front steps of the houses of Hampstead and Belsize Park. No doubt we could all do with learning ‘attentive patience’, as Russell puts it. It is not only comforting to think that what is real in living lies in the basic creativity which we can all learn to call up, rather than, for example, sex, or money, or the judgment of others – but it is also true, at least to an extent. The joy in making things out of what we find is sober, cheap, easy to access and available to everyone. And best of all, you can do it on your own. Milner’s method offers ordinary readers an inventive, literary self-help guide to learning from one’s senses the true shape of the life within us. Her work is not only a good deal easier to read than Klein’s, it is also not stuck on hatred. It doesn’t even stop at Freud’s ‘ordinary unhappiness’. She was out for actual happiness!

Yet Milner was advocating her method in the context of a welfare infrastructure that was intended to provide support for the patient’s self-cure in the form of therapeutic communities, halfway houses, psycho-therapeutic mother and baby clinics and a whole host of revolutionary new treatments, most of which were not, in the end, embraced by the psychiatric establishment. What does it mean to advocate for private creativity now, in a context of an increasingly privatised healthcare system that lacks the social infrastructure, as well as the will, that could democratise it? ‘Absent-mindfulness’ might be the perfect quietist therapy for today, a lucrative new branch of the wellness industry.

Drawing probably helped Susan, and Milner’s most restrained assessment of the analysis was that neither of them had been ‘wasting our time’ (recalling her recommendations for spare time well spent in An Experiment in Leisure). But The Hands of the Living God was written to prove herself to the psychoanalytic community. It is a record of what happens when the celebration of creativity becomes dogma, an account of an analyst floundering and perhaps of a whole analytical school in trouble. The more Milner insists on symbol formation as a sign of ‘healthy’ development, the more she interprets Susan’s drawing in itself as a measure of mental wellbeing and adjustment. (At its most crude, Susan is deemed ‘better’ when she starts drawing pictures with a recognisable foreground and background, a charting of progress not so far from Francis Reitman’s diagnostic interpretations of asylum patients’ artwork in his 1950 study Psychotic Art.)

Milner continued her daily analysis of Susan for more than sixteen years. You can’t fault her on commitment. But I wonder, for a therapist who believed that every step, however incoherent, is a step forwards (the ‘still’ and ‘not yet’ of the analytical endeavour), what would failure look like? How could she know when to call it a day? At the end of her treatment of Michael Clyne (lightning fast compared to Susan), who wanted to and did eventually become a chemist, he told Milner that when he grew up he was going to make her a present of a papier-mâché chemical clock ‘which would keep perfect time and be his own invention’. Milner’s interpretation of this fantasy gift focused on the malleability of the papier-mâché. The boy felt by the end of the treatment that he could create or mould his own environment, that he could play with ‘the real qualities of externality, objective time standing as the chief representative of these’. He may also have been letting her know he understood that measurement was important to her – the clock, after all, was a present for Milner. A chemical clock is used to display rates of reaction through periodic changes of colour, and part of the pleasure in watching the display, as yellow turns to black or blue or green and back again, is anticipating when it will come to an end.