I first encountered Marion Milner through her writings on creativity, compiled along with her other psychoanalytic papers in the volume The Suppressed Madness of Sane Men (1987a). In these papers, I found a kindred spirit who was intimately aware of many of the challenges and rewards of creative engagement. Here was a woman who was both an artist and a psychoanalyst, who seemed to learn from the inside out, a position with which I am intimately familiar. More than anyone else I had found, she described learning as a creative process, best achieved through an absorption in one's chosen medium. I used Milner's writings to support the development of my own ideas about both psychoanalysis and the creative process, thinking of her as something of a mentor, a touchstone at times. She came to reside in my mind as one of those familiar beings whose offerings become part of the ballast that helps us keep our bearings in the difficult work of psychoanalysis.

It was not until relatively recently that the reissue by Routledge of Milner's works brought forth the opportunity to read her earlier works and revisit the clinical works with which I was more familiar. In a field in which the female perspective has in many ways remained a “dark continent”, Milner's recounts of her own personal journey are both illuminating and vitalizing. Beginning at the beginning, in , I encountered the young Milner (or “Joanna Field”, as she called herself) in her 20s, not yet touched or constrained by a formal study of psychoanalysis, earnestly trying to understand her own internal complexities. I recognized the attempt to define herself in her own terms as, in part, the woman's effort to write the story of her life without becoming overly skewed by the way it might be written from another angle.