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This fascinating book by Alberto Stefana and Alessio Gamba introduces us to an important and relatively overlooked psychoanalyst, despite her creative contributions to psychoanalysis and the revolutionary thinking of Donald Winnicott.
Marion Milner, who lived to the grand age of 98 (1900–1998), belonged to the British Independent Group and began her training at the British Society in 1940. After an initial Jungian analysis, she came to Winnicott following a period of analysis with Sylvia Payne, who she left after four years. This was on the advice of Clifford Scott, her future analyst, who had already analysed Winnicott’s two wives. Winnicott was the supervisor of ‘Susan’, Milner’s patient who is introduced in this book by Stefana and Gamba in the last two chapters, and who Winnicott himself invited to stay in his house, which he sometimes did with difficult patients (Milner, 1969/2010).
Milner, Winnicott and other psychoanalysts, including Bion, Klein, and Meltzer were part of a group of intellectuals (the Imago group), who met regularly to talk about music, poetry and free thoughts. They were close to the Bloomsbury group, including Virginia Woolf and friends, and linked to the thinking of British Empiricism. Milner’s approach to psychoanalysis would today be considered as experimental.
The premise of this book is found in the concept of the ‘oceanic feeling’ that Freud describes in ‘Civilization and its discontents’ (1929): Freud speaks about it as akin to primary narcissism, typical of the newborn child, which has to be tolerated and shared; it is an experience of non-differentiation, which the mystic Rolland calls the ‘oceanic feeling’, a fusion with the world, a sense of belonging and universal sharing, which is the basis of our existence. We are talking about the first fundamental experience, a necessary premise for the definition of one’s separateness. Thus, for psychoanalysts, the first experience with the mother-environment is central: if we did not have a ‘g