On Not Being Able to Read: Marion Milner on Creativity and a Creative Reading of Milner

I am far away in some unknown land, I fancy it may be Utopia. The fountains play and in their spray there forms a cottage smallest of the small … I know what is inside because through the lattice windows lovely visions play across my mind … I call it the Home of the Unknown.

Reading, for me, has always been a pleasure: the drama of invention; the loss of self in the imagination of the other; the interplay of subjectivities in which the passions of the other are infused with our own private ones—our loves, our hates, our most secret desires. My identifications when reading—at times timid and apprehensive, at others bold and immersive—allow for the bridging of the internal and external, the forging of linkages that enable us to not only find and reclaim lost parts of self, the so-called lost object, but to also create something entirely new, something that has never been before.

Creative writing and reading are the stuff of Bion’s capacity to dream oneself to life (Bion, 1962; Ogden, 2007). “In my opinion,” wrote Freud, in a passage quoted by Bromberg, “all the aesthetic pleasure which a creative writer affords us … proceeds from a liberation of tensions in our minds … enabling us thenceforward to enjoy our own daydreams without self-reproach or shame” (p. 64) (Cavitch, 2007). To enjoy our own daydreams, to dream more freely—these are the gifts that the writer bestows upon us, the provision of a medium with which we may mold our own desires. The author’s world is a pliable substrate that can be used to catalyze the new and alive inside, and to enrich the complex landscape of our own internal world.

Imagine my consternation, then, upon discovering that there are times, long stretches even, when it seems nearly impossible to read, when the thought of merely picking up a book provokes a dissociative phobia. I first noticed this phenomenon