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This book is a psychoanalytic Festschrift—a collection of essays specially offered by the authors, and selected by the editor to celebrate an honoured colleague. Each essay is offered or chosen as an individual gem, to be placed amongst its fellows in a carefully made setting, and if the choice is successful and the setting well crafted a Festschrift can be an ornament to the person to whom the book is dedicated—a very particular kind of book.
This book is dedicated to a very particular psychoanalyst, Marion Milner. Singular, inventive, provocative, and much loved by those who knew, worked with, or were analysed and taught by her, Marion Milner possessed a mind, as illuminated in her writing, as clear as one would expect from someone whose brother was a Nobel laureate in physics, and who herself rigorously tested her hypotheses in her clinical practice. Apart from her psychoanalytic writings, it is for the honest self-exploration revealed in the books published under the name Joanna Field—A Life of One's Own and On Not Being Able to Paint—and her interest in and relationship to art and artists that she is perhaps best known.
Lesley Caldwell, at present Director of the Squiggle Foundation in London, an organisation devoted mainly to the teaching and spread of the ideas of Donald Winnicott, and of which Marion was an enthusiastic member, has selected and presented these papers by different authors to give honour to her memory.
Framed—and the relationship between frame and picture was an important part of Milner's thinking—by Lesley Caldwell's useful and interesting introduction and a final chapter of appreciations of Marion Milner by colleagues, friends and neighbours, the individual papers naturally address art and creativity as well as clinical work, and include W. H. Auden's enthusiastic 1934 review of A Life of One's Own, and Winnicott's 1951 review of On Not Being Able to Paint. Milner was a close associate of Winnicott's, so that it is not surprising to find that t