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International Review of Psycho-Analysis, Volume 17, Part 4, 1990
This paper was written in honour of Marion Milner's 90th birthday. It traces the development, in her three autobiographical books, A Life of One's Own, An Experiment in Leisure and Eternity's Sunrise, of the idea of an ‘Answering Activity’: the experience of an inner being, both part of oneself and greater than oneself, with which one can make contact through a particular kind of meditative awareness. I also explore the tension between technique and creativity in psychoanalysis and show how they must be kept in equilibrium without sacrificing either one. Milner's account of the ‘Answering Activity’ can help us towards the theory of psychoanalytic creativity which this requires.
International Review of Psycho-Analysis, Volume 17, Part 4, 1990
This paper is a psychoanalytic investigation into the experience of space in a schizoid borderline patient. Its aim is to show the correlation between mental space, corporeal space and the fantasy of the interior of the mother's body. This correlation can be viewed, in the light of Matte-Blanco's reconceptualization of the unconscious, as a symmetrical experience of being as a fused relation with the mother's body. The unfolding of this fantasy is followed in the psychoanalytic process of the patient. A hypothesis of the genesis of the difficulties in the development of asymmetrically discriminated spaces is offered. The psychoanalytic process allows the unfolding of symmetrical being in the transference. By way of this unfolding the patient's consciousness can start to discriminate his own space as different from the mother's body.