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Marion Milner's writings present us with a ‘true paradox…[S]he inserts herself as subject into the text… [yet] she is also very hidden, her lifelong wish was not
to be “legible”’ (p. 166). The re-publication of her works, completed 2012, and now Emma Letley's short biographical study, present us with the first opportunity to reassess this independent psychoanalyst. With limited access to personal sources, Letley takes us through each of Milner's books chronologically, interweaving her summary of key points tracing Milner's development with reviewers' responses. Enriched by her own reading of Milner's diaries and notebooks, Letley captures something of her elusive presence, and the evolution of her ideas on creativity, nature, art, mysticism, empty space, Freudian psychoanalysis, the body and more. Though we may be somewhat frustrated by not having a clear outline of Milner, an outline in art was considered unnatural to Milner, whose introspection returns again and again to consider the interplay of opposites, fathoming the unfathomable, empty space, nothingness, and the sudden deeply meaningful sense of being that can creatively arise out of such self-reflective, meditative endeavours.
Reading the book is like following Milner on one of her free associative threads, picking up memories and musings from images or memories, what she termed ‘beads’, ‘“moments of charged energy and unconscious power, images with a glow”’ (p. 13), as she gradually comes to discover the unconscious meaning. We learn, at the end—as it seems Milner, herself, only acknowledged fully in her 90s, that she had another self, split-off: the biting, aggressive Milner had not had the opportunity to discover, after having been weaned at three months, that her depressed mother had survived her own devouring desires. The book begins with a brief account of her family, their middle class respectability in Edwardian England, and the young Marion, idealizing her father and identifying with his great lov