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.
After reading The Hands of the Living God twice, the second time with most careful attention to the details, I am convinced that this account of the 20-year-long analysis of a gifted schizophrenic girl is the most beautifully written book on psychoanalytic themes that has ever appeared in English (and, as far as my knowledge goes, in any other language); that it conveys in an unparalleled fashion the rewards and agonies of practising psychoanalysis and the miseries, perplexities and fears of schizophrenia; and that it appears to me (writing as an interested layman) to have very important implications for the modification of some psychoanalytic techniques, perhaps particularly in treating psychotics, but certainly not confined to them. I will try to justify these large claims for one of the very few books published in the last 30 years which I consider a masterpiece.
Mrs Milner and 'Susan' were singularly well matched. Both have a lively sensitivity to and appreciation of all the arts, though Mrs Milner gives her chief love to painting and Susan to music; both have a deep feeling for the English language (Susan's account of her 16 'years of blackness' given on pp. 375–6 is a most moving and insightful short piece of English, worthy of inclusion in any anthology of English prose; poetry gave Mrs Milner not only her title but many clues in the course of treatment); both have a deep awareness of the body and its potentialities for modifying perception through relaxation and internal awareness, Susan apparently intuitively during the four years she worked on a farm before her first breakdown and the administration of ECT which robbed her of 'her soul' and 'all that beauty', Mrs Milner as a discursive interest for much of her life which she discussed in A Life of One's Own and On Not Being Able to Paint.
Her articulateness about her awareness of her own body-states and their effect on Susan in the psychoanalytic sessions is one of the major technical innovations describe