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The author, an English psychoanalyst, became well known in 1950 when
she published On Not Being Able to Paint. She selected the title of the present book from a 1920 poem by D. H. Lawrence, titled “Pansies.” “It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God. But it is a much more fearful thing to fall out of them.”
This book details the psychoanalytic treatment of a single patient, Susan, who spontaneously discovered her capacity to doodle. At the start of treatment Susan was very schizoid. Her ability to doodle filled in where the spoken word failed. Doodling led to drawings which reveal the deep unconscious perception about the nature of the battle between sanity and madness. These doodles and drawings (of which over 150 are reproduced in this book) together with Mrs. Milner's sensitive description of the therapeutic sessions constitute the revealing, unique and compelling interest of this book.
Treatment started when Susan was 23 years old and had just been released from a hospital where she had received electro-shock treatment. She told Mrs. Milner, three weeks after the last shock treatment, that she had no feelings and that nothing mattered. The treatment period lasted for twenty years, during which time Susan slowly found her way back to reality and eventually got married.
Art has been used in the treatment and psychotherapy of mentally ill persons before, but this is the first long-range project where this type of graphic communication has been skillfully used to supplement oral psychoanalysis. Mrs. Milner admirably succeeded in her therapeutic goals.
This reviewer assumes that Mrs. Milner wanted to present primarily the treatment process, because neither in the text nor in the bibliography does she mention similar work done by Margaret Naumburg in this country and by Ainsley Meares in Australia. These omissions do not detract from the content of this book, which is highly recommended to all professionals using art as an aid in psychoanalytic tre