You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
It is gratifying to see how, since the publication of a biography of Milner and the re-issue of editions of her main works (2010-2013), a new generation of scholars has come to the fore with work building and elaborating on these publications: one such is Emilia Halton-Hernandez. Her book considers Milner's autobiographical books and contends that her opus can be explored as positing a cure or cures, as an alternative to psychoanalytic treatment.
Halton-Hernandez is a meticulous and knowledgeable scholar as she charts the presence of ‘autobiographical cure’, a ‘distinctive version of object relations theory’ (p.3) in Milner's main texts. Thus, A Life of One's Own puts forward a method ‘to rival psychoanalysis’ (p.37); An Experiment in Leisure shows how the ‘answering activity’ is a ‘function found in one's own creative acts’ (p.47); Eternity's Sunrise focuses on Milner's ‘bead memories’, ‘the term bead memory embodying this notion of diary keeping as an objectification of the self that leads to a kind of transformation’ (p.51). Then, with On Not Being Able to Paint, the author structures her discussion around a series of images as she considers Milner's use of free drawing, her experiments with colour and line, the concepts of the pliable medium and, very importantly, that of the frame. In the case of The Hands of the Living God, the author demonstrates that it is ‘visual art […] that forms the heart of the account of the analysis’ (p.78) in a treatment that is ‘as much Milnerian as it is Freudian’, with analytic work proceeding ‘through relations that revolve around the patients’ autobiographical acts of drawing' (p.81).
Given these sensitively presented insights and highlights, I would also comment that, to some extent, the ‘cure’ motif is stretched and there is some repetition. (This and an incomplete index prompt me to wonder if the text could have benefitted from some more rigorous copyediting.) It is arguably worth thinking about whether ‘cure’, a term freque