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In this illuminating book (now re-printed in paper-back form) Marion Milner's courageous enquiry into the limits of her creativity in painting becomes a creative analytic process in its own right, and it is fascinating to see how in each stage as logical thought and insight come together her painting reaches a stage further in liberation.
She describes how “original work in painting … would demand facing certain facts about oneself as a separate being” and she has the courage to begin facing these and the “dangers inherent in the nature of imagination”. She discovers that an emphasis on outline comes from the “emotional need to imprison objects rigidly within themselves” and a fear that “letting in imagination meant letting in madness”. As she learns to let go the outline her drawings take on more life and when she finds “a way of thinking about the connection between madness and sanity” she is able to think more freely about the meaning of her drawings. She discovers in her free drawings the violence of her rebellion against her inner authorities and says “I had not thought that such an inner fight might interfere with attempts at creative activity … I had not fully realised that the restraint of one's will imposed by authority could at times feel like a threat to one's whole existence, an attempt to separate one from the very source of one's creative relation to the world”.
Marion Milner is then able to deal positively with the idea of separateness and suggest “It seemed then that one could attempt to avoid the sorrow of change and separation and loss by spiritually enveloping what one loved and taking it inside oneself, but that this did not really solve the problem; for there was still the fear that by having it inside one might have destroyed it. To an established painter, who knows that he can successfully bring what he has taken inside himself back to life in the outside world as a painting, there may be less anxiety in this act of spiritual envelopment in orde