You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Milner distinguishes two functions of symbol formation: a defensive measure that permits the avoidance of objectionable ideas, and an establishment of awareness of the real world. She is particularly interested in the use of symbolism in its second function. Under what conditions are the primary and secondary objects fused and felt as one? 'Are we not driven by the internal necessity for inner organization, pattern, coherence, the basic need to discover identity in difference without which experience becomes chaos?'
She compares the role of illusion in painting and in the psychoanalytic process by means of the analogy of the 'frame' which marks off the different kinds of realities within the picture frame from those without, and in psychoanalysis the 'frame that makes possible the full development of that creative illusion that analysts call the transference'. The central idea underlying psychoanalytic technique is that it is by means of this illusion that a better adaptation to the world outside is ultimately achieved. She brings out the parallel between Wordsworth's definition of the poet's function as the finding of the 'familiar in the unfamiliar' and the experience of the same process in analysis.
Milner gives a detailed account of the fantasy play of a child in analysis to illustrate these concepts, especially to demonstrate how the use of symbolism served the child to establish the external reality of the analyst and the outside world, the distinction between the self and the not-self. She saw in the boy's play an effort to express the idea of integration.
This leads the author into a consideration of the problems of the variations of feeling around the existence or nonexistence of body boundary. She