Marion Milner's Prefreudian Writings, 1926—1938: The originality and origins of her creativity model

Every so often over the years Marion Milner's name has appeared as a reference in this Journal. In Volume 2, 1957, Leopold Stein mentions her in his essay ‘What is a symbol supposed to be?’, as part of a group he considers to be significant psychoanalytic writers on symbolism. In this group he also included Ernest Jones, Ella Freeman Sharpe, and Charles Rycroft (Stein 1957, p. 76), as, paired with Melanie Klein, perceiving ‘in the symbol itself … a fusion of self and object’ (ibid., p. 77). Six years later, in the Journal of Analytical Psychology, Volume 8, Murray Jackson, whose bibliography, like Stein's, cites Marion Milner's 1955 publication ‘The role of illusion in symbol formation’, quotes her twice, first to support his idea that ‘the ego must be well established’ if when we ‘lose our boundaries to some extent [we can] discover new and creative identifications’ (Jackson 1963, p. 149) and a second time regarding how ‘“the sense of two-ness”’ develops from ‘“a recurrent merging of opposites”’, after which we ‘“can face the creative struggle of interacting opposites”’ (ibid., p. 154). In ‘Death and creativity’, Rosemary Gordon refers to her as sharing Hanna Segal's view of ‘the creative process as “a genital bisexual activity, necessitating a good identification with the father who gives and the mother who receives and bears the child’ (Gordon 1977, p. 134). When discussing the analysts who, like Jung, have advocated ‘during certain stages in the analysis … such … procedures as nonintervention’, Gordon groups her with Balint, Little, Winnicott, and Masud Khan (ibid., p. 161). Anthony Storr, who refers to the second