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In addition to exploring psychoanalysis—a better description than the rather off-putting and misleading main title—this book is about the subjective sense of vibrant wholeness that comes from being on good terms with one's own unconscious. This theme intertwines with the quality of the style, making for an “inner marriage” between searching thought and lively expression.
In the Introduction we sample both. Milner's first book, An Experiment in Leisure —“blitzed out of print in the raids on London in 1940, but not before it had received some reviews which helped my own thinking…vividly prefigured the central problem I have ever since been struggling with, both in my patients and myself, the problem of how truly to trust ‘the unconscious,’ trust the emptiness, the blankness, trust what seems to be not there” (p. 5). She discovered that her writings ever since have been about being able to make a “creative surrender” and not protect oneself from the imagination and the need for certainty and acquire what Keats called “negative capability.” Keats defined this as the capacity to dwell in uncertainties and overcome the “consequitive