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Marion Milner's new book, The Suppressed Madness of Sane Men, is a collection of her old and new writings with personal notes interspersed. It is sometimes uneven, sometimes repetitive, but almost always interesting and not infrequently stimulating and inspiring. Rather than wait to the end of this review to recommend it or not, I shall first say I do, heartily, and try to justify my opinion to the reader.
I suspect that some will ask, who is Marion Milner? She is hard to pin down in a definition, but let me try. Since Milner is such an autobiographical writer, much of this can be gleaned from the book. Milner is a British psychoanalyst of the middle school who is usually placed in D. W. Winnicott's camp, or at least as one of his followers. She is an artist who wrote a fascinating volume under the pseudonym Joanna Field called On Not Being Able To Paint(1950). "Joanna Field" also wrote "A Life of One's Own" (1935) a collection of personal diaries which were inspired by those of Montaigne. The title, of course, brings to mind Virginia Woolf's essay. This should be no coincidence, as both authors struggled with the inner and outer barriers that interfere with an artist's, particularly the female artist's, ability to get on with her creations.
Then, for reasons of her own, Joanna Field shed her disguise and Marion Milner wrote a book on one of her deep interests, education, entitled The Human Problem in Schools. Eventually she was analyzed by Sylvia Payne and began psychoanalytic training at the British Institute, having been directly influenced by teachers and supervisors such as Melaine Klein, D. W. Winnicott, and Clifford Scott. In 1969 she wrote her important book, The Hands of the Living God: An Account of a Psychoanalytic Treatment. This is a detailed clinical history of the treatment of a talented, extremely regressed patient who communicated for significant periods of time with Milner, primarily through drawings. It is a goldmine for analysts, t