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This rich and readable paper explores the life and work of psychoanalyst Marion Milner (1900-1998) with emphasis on her contribution to understanding mystical states of mind in relation to psychoanalysis. Sayers skilfully traces the evolving threads of Milner's ideas as they weave through the course of her long and wide-ranging life, leaving the reader with a real sense of their relation to Milner's own individuation process. These ideas are concerned with ‘drawing attention to the potential for health and creativity in undoing the obstacles to mystical oneness with what she sometimes referred to as God, the unconscious or the id’ (p. 106). Mystical states are presented as experiences of ‘union’ which transcend the boundaries of self and other, past and present, inner and outer. The central thread of Milner's thinking, which Sayers extracts from various writings, is that ‘creativity and psychological aliveness generally involve returning to the infantile illusion of inner-outer fusion with our mothers and the world around us’ (p. 113). Sayers refers to other psychoanalysts, notably Bion, Winnicott, Coltart and Eigen, who think about the capacity for experiencing mystical states as an aspect of psychological aliveness. She also mentions the wariness of many psychoanalysts' attitudes to mystical experience and other regressive states characteristic of primary narcissism, but does not elaborate. The basis for this seems to me to be an equation between pathologically narcissistic states such as psychosis, and those which are more benign in nature.
Milner's understanding of the difference was hard won through her experience of her own regressed states of mind, and the reader is left with a deep impression of her journey. Her ‘mystical’ perspective on regression is also offered by Bion's ‘O’ and by Jung's ‘Self’, and Sayers draws attention to the resonance between Bion's and Milner's work. From this perspective, the ego's capacity for ‘embracing nothingness’ which is funda