Red Shoes, Untapped Madness, and Winnicott on the Cross: An Interview with Marion Milner

Marion Milner (1900-1998) was a highly respected analyst of the “Middle Group” of the British Psycho-analytical Society, a group later known as the Independents. She is remembered for her contributions to the understanding of creativity, aesthetics, and symbolism, and for her study of mental activity in daily life. Her books are A Life of One's Own (1934; written under the pseudonym Joanna Field), On Not Being Able to Paint (1950), Eternity's Sunrise (1987a), The Hands of the Living God (1969), and a collection of essays called The Suppressed Madness of Sane Men (1987b). Of these books, The Hands of the Living God is the most clinically relevant. It is a description of a long-term analysis of a very disturbed young woman who worked with Milner through the medium of drawings that she brought in when she could not find verbal language to speak her thoughts. The text is accompanied by reproductions of many of the drawings, which allows the reader to have a personal experience of the nonverbal communications that Milner was dealing with. With this book and, indeed, with her entire written legacy, she shows how a person needs to master profound psychotic and depressive anxieties in order to discover their own essence and their creativity. Robert Rodman (2003), author of a recent biography of Winnicott, describes Milner as “Winnicott's only intellectual and imaginative peer in the British Society” due to their mutual preoccupation with play and their “relentless clinical- introspective devotion” (p. 139). She is widely regarded as one of the most innovative of the Middle Group analysts, along with Balint, Rycroft, Khan, Little, Winnicott, and (loosely associated at a distance) Fairbairn. Because of her vivacity, her intelligence, her openness and her scholarship, she has been inspirational to many people who share her quest to be “alive” in the midst of the drudgery and terrors of everyday living.