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Marion Milner was an extraordinary person by most standards. An idiosyncratic and imaginative woman, her work and writing have subtly influenced many psychoanalytic practitioners and writers in the decades since she began her clinical supervision and her writing after the second war. A psychoanalyst and an artist she was intrigued by the power of the unconscious mind to influence the external world. For Marion Milner, the professional life of the clinician provided rich opportunities for the study of the unconscious in our lives and to explore the nature of its expression through our conscious activity and feeling.
Emma Letley’s new biography of Marion Milner is a thorough and detailed account of Milner’s work, written by a scrupulous researcher and affectionate devotee. Starting with the details of Milner’s early life and her family history, the biography moves on to provide a chronology of the key events of her life, interwoven with the development of her interests and ideas and her career path. The writing reacquaints us with this original and unusual thinker, opening a door again to a tenacious, energetic and vivacious mind.
Milner grew up in a comfortable and conventional Edwardian household, the youngest child of three. She knew of the struggles and the insecurities that can accompany childhood, brought up by a disappointed, perhaps depressed, mother and a father whose mental frailty affected the whole family. Despite this, Milner enjoyed a happy, sympathetic connection with her father, finding companionship in their shared love of drawing and nature study. At an early age Milner learnt to observe carefully and precisely, recording her observations in sketches and notes alongside her father who found great solace in the countryside around their home. A love of the natural world and its spiritual meaning remained central to Milner throughout her life. She found it always a reliable, meditative space and a source of renewal. Her carefully kept notebooks, sketchboo