The Marion Milner Tradition provides a comprehensive overview of Milner’s eight-volume oeuvre for the first time, and celebrates her pioneering achievements both in psychoanalytic world and in creative and scientific disciplines such as clinical and organisational psychology, philosophy, mindfulness and spirituality, management theory, art therapy, as well as art appreciation/criticism. This volume considers Marion Blackett Milner through the prism of her innovative engagement with people, art, and human experience, as well as her extraordinary contribution as an original thinker and researcher within the Independent Group of the British Psychoanalytical Society. The co-editors’ exploratory approach to her legacy is as open as the spirit of Milnerean ‘discovery research’ in defining its distinctive features. An assembly of fifty contributors were invited to interrogate the evolution of what is becoming known as the Milner Tradition, demarcating her influence on theory and clinical practice over the many decades of her life and since her death. They draw upon their professional interviews or friendship with Marion Blackett Milner, or intimate experience of her as an analyst, supervisor, or relative. Similarly, participants in global reading groups in Australia, England, Greece, Northern Ireland, the Republic of Ireland, and South Africa recount personal responses to their own exercise in action research. The plethora of riches in this book will be of interest to both new and veteran readers of Milner’s opus, as well as students and practitioners from a variety of therapeutic and other disciplines.

This book traces the development of British psychoanalyst Marion Milner’s (1900–98) autobiographical acts throughout her lifetime, proposing that Milner is a thinker to whom we can turn to explore the therapeutic potentialities of autobiographical and creative self-expression. Milner’s experimentation with aesthetic, self-expressive techniques are a means to therapeutic ends, forming what Emilia Halton-Hernandez calls her "autobiographical cure." This book considers whether Milner’s work champions this site for therapeutic work over that of the relationship between patient and analyst in the psychoanalytic setting. This book brings to light a theory and practice which is latent and sometimes hidden, but which is central to understanding what drives Milner’s autobiographical work. It is by doing this work of elucidation and organisation that Halton-Hernandez finds Milner to be a thinker with a unique take on psychoanalysis, object relations theory, creativity, and autobiography, working at the interstices of each. Divided into two fascinating sections exploring Milner’s distinctive method and the legacy and influence of her work, this book will appeal to psychoanalysts, art therapists, philosophers, and art and literary researchers alike. The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons [Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND)] 4.0 license.

The social practice of tact was an invention of the nineteenth century, a period when Britain was witnessing unprecedented urbanization, industrialization, and population growth. In an era when more and more people lived more closely than ever before with people they knew less and less about, tact was a new mode of feeling one’s way with others in complex modern conditions. In this book, David Russell traces how the essay genre came to exemplify this sensuous new ethic and aesthetic. Russell argues that the essay form provided the resources for the performance of tact in this period and analyzes its techniques in the writings of Charles Lamb, John Stuart Mill, Matthew Arnold, George Eliot, and Walter Pater. He shows how their essays offer grounds for a claim about the relationship among art, education, and human freedom—an “aesthetic liberalism”—not encompassed by traditional political philosophy or in literary criticism. For these writers, tact is not about codes of politeness but about making an art of ordinary encounters with people and objects and evoking the fullest potential in each new encounter. Russell demonstrates how their essays serve as a model for a critical handling of the world that is open to surprises, and from which egalitarian demands for new relationships are made. Offering fresh approaches to thinking about criticism, sociability, politics, and art, Tact concludes by following a legacy of essayistic tact to the practice of British psychoanalysts like D. W. Winnicott and Marion Milner.

This focused and thorough book by Alberto Stefana and Alessio Gamba delves into Marion Milner’s contribution to psychoanalytic clinical theory and technique. The authors offer an overview of Milner’s work as a psychoanalyst, writer, and gifted painter. They bring to light how each of her clinical concepts and theorisations have been shaped by predecessors and, in turn, have inspired subsequent analysts. The importance of imaginative scenarios for both patient and therapist within the analytic context is particularly emphasised. The authors conclude by focusing on the retained clinical relevance of Milner’s contribution for contemporary psychoanalysis. Marion Miler: A Contemporary Introduction is essential for students of psychoanalysis, as well as academics and psychoanalytic practitioners interested in the clinical-theoretical work of this pioneer in psychoanalysis.

"[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.

This is a book about reading, drawing, and getting better--and what they have to do with one another. The British essayist, artist, and psychoanalyst Marion Milner (1900-1996) thought deeply about how reading, drawing, and getting better related to each other. The guiding question of Milner's life was of how people come to feel alive in, and feel creatively responsive to, their own lives. In pursuit of this, Milner explored fields as diverse as anthropology, folklore, education, literature, art, philosophy, mysticism, and psychology. She became one of the twentieth century's most extraordinary thinkers about creativity. David Russell shows that there is no writer quite like Milner and the rewards of reading her are immense. Key to all her writing is her search for creative practices of attention--of how we pay attention in the life we have. She helped to develop a kind of psychoanalysis in Britain that focussed on the ways people relate to their own lives and the lives of others. Milner was literary and artistic; she took herself as her subject. Her writing performs ways of responding associatively to the words and images she encountered. In the process, she found she was a quite different person than she had first thought. In the 1930s Milner invented a form for writing about reading: an original kind of diary book, which is structured by the experience of going back to, and rereading, past diaries. In her interplay of past and present selves, she finds new ways of looking at, and experiencing, the world.

'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.

What is it like to be an artist? Drawing on interviews with professional artists, this book takes the reader inside the creative process. The author, an artist and a psychotherapist, uses psychoanalytic theory to shed light on fundamental questions such as the origin of new ideas and the artist’s state of mind while working. Based on interviews with 33 professional artists, who reflect on their experiences of creating new works of art, as well as her own artistic practice, Patricia Townsend traces the trajectory of the creative process from the artist’s first inkling or ‘pre-sense’, through to the completion of a work, and its release to the public. Drawing on psychoanalytic theory, particularly the work of Donald Winnicott, Marion Milner and Christopher Bollas, the book presents the artist’s process as a series of interconnected and overlapping stages, in which there is a movement between the artist’s inner world, the outer world of shared ‘reality’, and the spaces in-between. Creative States of Mind: Psychoanalysis and the Artist’s Process fills an important gap in the psychoanalytic theory of art by offering an account of the full trajectory of the artist’s process based on the evidence of artists themselves. It will be useful to artists who want to understand more about their own processes, to psychoanalysts and psychotherapists in their clinical work, and to anyone who studies the creative process.

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.

What happens to the thinking of a thinker who refuses a discipleship? This book attempts to answer this question in relation to D. W. Winnicott and the evolution of his thinking. He eschewed a following, privileging the independence of his thinking and fostering the same in others. However Winnicott's thinking exerts a growing influence in areas including psychoanalysis, psychology, and human development. This book looks at the nature of Winnicott's thought and its influence. It first examines the development of Winnicott's thinking through his own life time (first generation) and then continues this exploration by viewing the thinking in members of the group with a strong likelihood of influence from him; his analysands (second generation) and their analysands (third generation).