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Bothered by Alligators is a lovely book that is more than lovely. It is filled with practical wisdom for living, warts and all. This is Marion Milner's last book, one she worked on in her nineties and was still getting ideas for sitting in bed the day she died at the age of 98.
It started when she found picture-stories her son, John, made when a child and a diary she kept at that time. One thing she wondered about was how John's storybook was touched by her maternal depression. In the first four parts of the book we are treated to back-and-forth explorations of John's storybook linked with Marion's diaries.
I hope you forgive me for using her first name here. I feel uncomfortable being formal. Marion and I met in 1975 and corresponded until near her death. She shared with me personal difficulties as well as creative concerns. We were, I feel, very supportive to one another. In 1977 I reviewed On Not Being Able to Paint for this journal. It touched the co-generative arising of a sense of self and other, which plays a role in our sense of generativity. In 1983 I published the first serious, extended exploration of her work.
She sent her early manuscript to me and Clifford Scott, asking for our thoughts about publication. She was hesitant for several reasons, one being how much she reveals about emotional states of mother and child, as well as laying bare marital problems of the time. Scott and I were both supportive and encouraging, to say the least. John gave full permission.
I just learned from the published book that she entered analysis with Scott after leaving Winnicott. Scott told her she never had an analysis. Her analysis with Scott ended after two years, when he returned to Canada. As an aside, she told him to review my work, The Electrified Tightrope (Eigen, 1993), when it came out, which he did for the first volume of the Canadian Journal of Psychoanalysis.
Another aside I learned from reading this work is that Adam Phillips's (1989) book Winnicott helped her se