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Marion Milner (1900–1998) Was a Distinguished British Psycho- Analyst, Educationalist, Autobiographer and Artist

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Marion Milner (1900–1998) Was a Distinguished British Psycho- Analyst, Educationalist, Autobiographer and Artist On Not Being Able to Paint Milner’s great study, first published in 1950, discusses the nature of creativity and those forces which prevent its expression. In focus- ing on her own beginner’s efforts to draw and paint, she analyses not the mysterious and elusive ability of the genius but – as the title suggests – the all too common and distressing situation of ‘not being able’ to create. With a new introduction by Janet Sayers this edition of On Not Being Able to Paint brings the text to the present generation of readers in the fields of psychoanalysis, education and all those, specialist and general audiences alike, with an interest or involve- ment in the creative process and those impulses impeding it in many fields. Marion Milner (1900–1998) was a distinguished British psycho- analyst, educationalist, autobiographer and artist. Janet Sayers is Professor of Psychoanalytic Psychology at the University of Kent in Canterbury where she works as an NHS psychotherapist. Her books include Mothering Psychoanalysis (1991), Freudian Tales (1997), Kleinians (2000), Freud’s Art (2007), and recent completion of a biography of Adrian Stokes. Emma Letley is a writer, academic and psychoanalytic psycho- therapist, trained with the Arbours Association, and practising in Notting Hill Gate and at King’s College London. She is the biographer of Marion Milner. On Not Being Able to Paint Marion Milner New introduction by Janet Sayers Series Editor: Emma Letley Literary Executors: John Milner and Margaret Walters First published 1950 by Heinemann Educational Books Ltd Reprinted 2010 by Routledge 27 Church Road, Hove, East Sussex BN3 2FA Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa business This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2010. To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk. © 2010 The Estate of Marion Milner by arrangement with John Milner and Margaret Walters c/o Paterson Marsh Ltd. Introduction © Janet Sayers 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. This publication has been produced with paper manufactured to strict environmental standards and with pulp derived from sustainable forests. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Milner, Marion Blackett. On not being able to paint / Marion Milner ; edited by Emma Letley. p. cm. Originally published: London : Heinemann, 1950. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Painting. 2. Creation (Literary, artistic, etc.) I. Letley, Emma. II. Title. ND1140.M5 2010 750.1′9—dc22 2010025616 ISBN 0-203-83365-1 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 978–0–415–55076–5 (hbk) ISBN 978–0–415–55078–9 (pbk) To my son and his generation and may they not take as long as I have in finding out about these matters Contents List of illustrations ix Foreword by Anna Freud xiii Introduction xvii Note to second edition xxi New introduction by Janet Sayers xxiii PA RT I The emergence of the free drawings 1 (Firing of the imagination) 1 What the eye likes 3 2 Being separate and being together 10 3 Outline and the solid earth 17 4 The plunge into colour 26 5 The necessity of illusion 31 PA RT I I The content of the free drawings 39 (Crucifying the imagination) 6 Monsters within and without 41 7 Disillusion and hating 53 8 Preserving what one loves 65 viii CONTENTS PART III The method of the free drawings 81 (Incarnating the imagination) 9 Reciprocity and ordered freedom 83 10 Refusal of reciprocity 90 11 Ideals and the fatal prejudice 101 12 Rhythm and the freedom of the free drawings 110 13 The concentration of the body 123 PA RT I V The use of the free drawings 131 (The image as mediator) 14 The role of the medium 133 15 The role of images 141 PA RT V The use of painting 147 16 Painting and living 149 17 Painting as making real 159 Postscript: What it amounts to 169 APPENDIX 173 I The ordering of chaos 173 II The anal aspect of the parrot’s egg 174 III Infantile prototypes of creativity 178 IV Changes in the sense of self 179 V Rhythm relaxation and the orgasm 182 VI Painting and symbols 184 VII The two kinds of thinking 188 VIII Painting and imitation 190 IX A place for absent-mindedness 191 Bibliography to first edition 194 Bibliography to second edition 195 Description of original drawings 198 Index 201 Illustrations The Angry Parrot frontispiece 1 Mrs. Punch 5 2 ‘Beautiful Young Girl’ 6 3 ‘Summer Morning’ 7 4 ‘Summer Beeches’ 8 5 Nursery 11 6 Spanish Garden 12 7 Milkman 15 8 Two Jugs 19 9 Thunder over The Sea 21 10 Earth (a, b, c, d)22 11 Sea Wall (a, b)23 12 Blasting Witch 44 13 Frugal Mouse 45 14 Innocent Donkey 46 15 The Demanding Bottle 47 16 ‘Freedom’ 48 17 Lamb in Wolf’s Clothing 50 18 Salome 51 19 Macbeth and the Witches 54 20 Skeleton under the Sea 55 21 Ape in the Garden of Eden 60 22 Comment 61 23 The Escaping Bear 63 24 Small Porgies 69 25 Horrified Tadpole 69 26 Drawing without a Name 71 27 The Pregnant Butcher 73 x ILLUSTRATIONS 28 The Farmer’s Wife 74 29 Queen Elizabeth and the Bashful Parrot 75 30 The Mount of Olives 77 31 Two Ways of Drawing (a)85 31 Two Ways of Drawing (b)85 32 Chaos 88 33 N.B.G. 91 34 Rats in the Sacristy 93 35 The Mills of God 94 36 The Dodder Clown 97 37 The Turkey-Conductor 100 38 The Eagle and the Cave-man 103 39 Many-eyed Insect 105 40 Entombment 114 41 If the Sun and Moon... 116 42 Termagant Wife 118 43 Bonfire 119 44 Figure of Eight 119 45 Body Postures (a) 126 45 Body Postures (b) 127 46 Two-face Dog-cat 128 47 Ego-Island 137 48 ‘O Dismay, I, a Wingless Mortal...’ 157 49 Bursting Seed-pod 171 O Jerusalem! Jerusalem! I have forsaken thy courts, Thy pillars of ivory and gold, thy curtains of silk and fine Linen, thy pavements of precious stones, thy walls of pearl And gold, thy gates of Thanksgiving, thy windows of Praise, Thy clouds of Blessing, thy Cherubims of Tender Mercy, Stretching their Wings sublime over the Little Ones of Albion. O Human Imagination! O Divine Body, I have crucifièd! I have turnèd my back upon thee into the Wastes of Moral Law: There Babylon is builded in the Waste, founded in Human desolation. O Babylon! thy Watchman stands over thee in the night; Thy severe Judge all the day long proves thee, O Babylon, With provings of Destruction, with giving thee thy heart’s desire. William Blake Concepts can never be presented to me merely, they must be knitted into the structure of my being, and this can only be done through my own activity. M. P. Follett, Creative Experience Foreword Marion Milner’s treatment of psychic creativity differs in sev- eral respects from those well-established approaches to the subject to which psycho-analytic readers owe whatever familiarity with it they possess. She chooses as the object of her scrutiny not the professional and recognised artist but herself as a ‘Sunday-painter’; not the finished masterpiece but her own fumbling and amateurish beginner’s efforts to draw and paint. In short, she analyses not the mysterious and elusive ability of the genius who achieves self-expression through the medium of painting, but – as the title of the book suggests – the all too common and distressing restric- tions by which the creativity of the average adult individual is held in check. It is fascinating for the reader to follow the author’s attempts to rid herself of the obstacles which prevent her painting, and to compare this fight for freedom of artistic expression with the battle for free association and the uncov- ering of the unconscious mind which make up the core of an analyst’s therapeutic work. The amateur painter, who first puts pencil or brush to paper, seems to be in much the same mood as the patient during his initial period on the analytic couch. Both ventures, the analytic as well as the creative one, seem to demand similar external and internal conditions. There is the same need for ‘circumstances in which it is safe to be absent-minded’ (i.e. for conscious logic and reason to be absent from one’s mind). There is the same unwillingness to transgress beyond the reassuring limits of the secondary process and ‘to accept chaos as a temporary stage’. There is the same fear of the ‘plunge into no-differentiation’ and the xiv FOREWORD disbelief in the ‘spontaneous ordering forces’ which emerge, once the plunge is taken. There is, above all, the same terror of the unknown. Evidently, it demands as much courage from the beginning painter to look at objects in the external world and see them without clear and compact outlines, as it demands courage from the beginning analysand to look at his own inner world and suspend secondary elaboration.
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