A Life of One's Own

A Life of One's Own
Author: Marion Milner
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 171
Release: 2024-05-01
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 1040025102

'This is what I really want. I want to discover ways to discriminate the important things in human life. I want to find ways of getting past this blind fumbling with existence.' - Marion Milner, from A Life of One’s Own. How often do we really ask ourselves, 'What will make me happy? What do I really want from life?' In A Life of One’s Own Marion Milner, a renowned British psychoanalyst, artist and autobiographer, takes us on an extraordinary and compelling seven-year inward journey to discover what it is that makes her happy. On its first publication, W. H. Auden found the book 'as exciting as a detective story' and, as Milner searches out clues, the reader quickly becomes involved in the chase. Using her own personal diaries, she analyses moments of everyday life that can bring surprising joy, such as walking, listening to music, and drawing. She also records, in a disarmingly clear and insightful manner, the struggle between the urge to order and control one’s thoughts and standing back to let them wander where they may. A pioneering account of lived experience that also anticipates the contemporary phenomenon of mindfulness, A Life of One’s Own is a great adventure in thinking and living whose insights remain as fresh today as they were on the book’s first publication in the 1930s. This Routledge Classics edition includes a revised Introduction by Rachel Bowlby.

Marion Milner: The Life

Marion Milner: The Life
Author: Emma Letley
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 262
Release: 2013-08-15
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 1135022224

Artist, poet, educationalist and autobiographer, Marion Milner is considered one of the most original of psychoanalytic thinkers whose life (1900-1998) spans a century of radical change. Marion Milner: The Life, is the first biography of this extraordinary woman. It introduces Milner and her works to the reader through her family, colleagues and, above all through her books, charting their evolution and development as well as their critical reception and contribution to current twenty-first century debates and discourses. In this book Emma Letley draws on primary sources, including the newly-opened Marion Milner Collection at the Archives of the British Psychoanalytical Society in London, as well as interviews and the re-contextualised series of Milner texts. She traces the process of Milner's writing of her books, her discovery of psychoanalysis, her training and her place in that world from the 1940's onwards. Marion Milner: The Life includes discussion of Milner's connection with D.W. Winnicott and her emergence as a most individual member of the Independent Group. Letley also shows how Milner's Personal Notebooks offer fascinating insights into her relationships, both personal and professional, and into many of her important ideas on creativity, the body-mind relationship, her revolutionary ideas on education and her particular personality as clinician working with both children and adults. Further, Letley explores Milner's literary character from her very early diaries and narratives to her last book written in her 90's published in 2012. Marion Milner: The Life places Marion Milner firmly in her Edwardian family setting and contains new material from primary sources, including a new view of her collegial connections. It provides a wealth of material on her life and works that will be invaluable to psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, art psychotherapists, students, those involved with life writing and autobiography, and the general reader.

Bothered By Alligators

Bothered By Alligators
Author: Marion Milner
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 330
Release: 2013-03-01
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 113649488X

Milner's final text, Bothered by Alligators, came about when, in her nineties, she unexpectedly came across a diary she had kept during the early years of her son's life, recording his conversations and play between the ages of two and nine. With it was a storybook written and illustrated by him when he was about seven years old. Whilst working on the material, Milner gradually realised that both diary and storybook were provoking questions she realised had scarcely been asked, let alone answered in her own analysis. Through her memories, her notebooks and by interpreting her own previously discarded drawings and paintings, she reaches a point of awareness that they were depicting things she did not know in herself, addressing her relationships not only with her son but also with her husband, her father, and in particular, her mother. Like many of Milner's earlier books there is a deeply personal quality to Bothered by Alligators, but it is a quality that transcends the personal and reveals insights and conclusions that will be both interesting and useful to clinicians; and fascinating to readers from a psychological, a literary, an artistic or an educational background, and, in particular, those with an interest in psychoanalysis and autobiography and in Milner's work.

An Experiment in Leisure

An Experiment in Leisure
Author: Marion Milner
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 226
Release: 2024-05-01
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 1040028381

'Before I began this experiment I had always been haunted by the feeling that the surface of life, what everyone said about it, was quite different from the reality of life, that the important things that were happening all the time were on the whole quite different from what was said about them.' - Marion Milner What is it that stops people from knowing what they want? How much of our experience is shaped by images, symbols, and early memories – and do such things help or hinder one becoming an adult? Written in 1936, An Experiment in Leisure continues Marion Milner’s unique and compelling investigation into how we lead our lives, complementing the account she began in A Life of One’s Own. Attempting to understand the gap between what she memorably describes as ‘the poverty of words and the reality of living’, she draws on memory images – in books, mythology, religious experience, travel, and even going to the theatre – that seem to point to a suspension of ordinary, everyday awareness. From this state of emptiness springs an increasing imaginative appreciation of being alive and, as Milner concludes, of being a woman. With a new Foreword by Akshi Singh, An Experiment in Leisure remains a striking and captivating adventure in thinking and living with uncertainty, whose insights remain fresh and relevant today.

The Hands of the Living God

The Hands of the Living God
Author: Marion Milner
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 547
Release: 2010-09-13
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1136844775

"[This is] a book about art (and writing about art), about emptiness, breathing, ordinary language, mysticism, the body, the sexes, childhood, parenting, impersonality, God, theory, exchange, change, tact, forms of inattention, belief, scepticism ..." Adam Phillips, from the new introduction.

Eternity's Sunrise

Eternity's Sunrise
Author: Marion Milner
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 262
Release: 2013-04-15
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 1135717559

Following on from A Life of One’s Own and An Experiment in Leisure, Eternity’s Sunrise explores Marion Milner’s way of keeping a diary. Recording small private moments, she builds up a store of ‘bead memories.’ A carved duck, a sprig of asphodel, moments captured in her travels in Greece, Kashmir and Israel, circus clowns, a painting - each makes up a 'bead' that has a warmth or glow which comes in response to asking the simple question: What is the most important thing that happened yesterday? From these beads – sacred, horrific, profane, funny – grows a sense of an ‘answering activity’, the result of turning one’s attention inwards to experience real joy. What Marion Milner conveys so vividly and inspirationally is her lifelong intention to live as completely as possible in the moment. With a new introduction by Hugh Haughton, Eternity’s Sunrise will be essential reading for all those interested in reflecting on the nature of their own happiness – whether readers from a literary, an artistic, a historical, an educational or a psychoanalytic/psychotherapeutic background.

Marion Milner

Marion Milner
Author: Marion Milner
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 203
Release: 2019-07-23
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 1317709454

In this series, Emma Letley has worked with the Marion Milner estate to re-contextualise six classic volumes by arranging for experts to provide new scholarly introductions to each book. This six volume pack comprises: The Hands of the Living God On Not being Able to Paint Eternity's Sunrise A Life of One's Own An Experiment in Leisure. Bothered by Alligators These volumes will be useful and relevant to seasoned analysts as well as those new to Milner's work, making them attractive to a whole new generation of readers from both inside and outside of the psychotherapy profession.

Image, Sense, Infinities, and Everyday Life

Image, Sense, Infinities, and Everyday Life
Author: Michael Eigen
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 202
Release: 2018-05-08
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 042991475X

Image and sensing have been underrated in Western thought but have come into their own since the Romantic movement and have always been valued by poets and mystics. Images come in all shapes and sizes and give expression to our felt sense of life. We say we are made in the image of God, yet God has no image. What kind of image do we mean? An impalpable image carrying impalpable sense? An ineffable sense permeates and takes us beyond the five senses, creating infinities within everyday life. Some people report experiencing colour and sound when they write or hear words. Sensing mediates the feel of life, often giving birth to image. In this compelling book, the author leads us through an array of images and sensing in many dimensions of experience, beginning with a sense of being born all through life, psychosis, mystical moments, the body, the pregnancy of "no", shame, his session with Andre Green, and his thoughts related to James Grotstein, Wilfred Bion, and Marion Milner.

The Muse

The Muse
Author: Adele Tutter
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 281
Release: 2016-08-12
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1317510852

Psychoanalysts have long been fascinated with creative artists, but have paid far less attention to the men and women who motivate, stimulate, and captivate them. The Muse counters this trend with nine original contributions from distinguished psychoanalysts, art historians, and literary scholars—one for each of the nine muses of classical mythology—that explore the muses of disparate artists, from Nicholas Poussin to Alison Bechdel. The Muse breaks new ground, pushing the traditional conceptualization of muses by considering the roles of spouse, friend, rival, patron, therapist—even a late psychoanalytic theorist—in facilitating creativity. Moreover, they do so not only by providing inspiration, but also by offering the artist needed material and emotional support; tolerating competitive aggression; promoting reflection and insight; and eliciting awe, anxiety and gratitude. Integrating art history and literary criticism with a wide spectrum of contemporary psychoanalytic perspectives, The Muse is essential reading for psychoanalysts and psychotherapists interested in the relationships that enhance and support creative work. Fully interdisciplinary, it is also accessible to readers in the fields of art, art history, literature, memoir, and film. The Muse sheds new light on that most mysterious dyad, the artist and muse—and thus on the creative process itself.

Art, Creativity, Living

Art, Creativity, Living
Author: Lesley Caldwell
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 175
Release: 2018-04-19
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 0429910975

This volume in the Winnicott Studies series is dedicated to the life and work of Marion Milner and reflects, in varying ways, her unique use of Winnicott's work to shape her own thinking about art and creativity. Among the papers here are contemporary reviews of Milner's books by both Winnicott and the poet W.H. Auden - the latter providing fascinating insights into his own views on psychoanalysis. Malcolm Bowie discusses Winnicott's legacy to psychoanalysis and art; Adam Phillips writes on 'Winnicott's Hamlet' and John Fielding tackles another Shakepearean theme in examining Othello. The book also contains papers by the distinguished British authors Michael Podro and Ken Wright, several appreciations of Marion Milner by those who knew and worked with her, and an illuminating introduction by Lesley Caldwell drawing together the book's themes. The papers in this volume are united by a very Winnicottian concern with aliveness, and with art. They are both a fitting tribute to Marion Milner and a testimony to the range and depth of work taking place under the aegis of The Squiggle Foundation.