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When I first came across the work of Marion Milner, her books were mostly out of print. Happily this changed in 2010–2012 when Routledge published A Life of One’s Own (1934), An Experiment in Leisure (1937), On Not Being Able to Paint (1950), The Hands of the Living God (1969), Eternity’s Sunrise (1987), and Bothered by Alligators (2012). Excellent introductions were added, by Rachel Bowlby, Maud Ellman, Janet Sayers, Adam Phillips, Hugh Haughton, and Margaret Walters, respectively; with handsome covers based on the collages Milner made in her 90s by cutting up and recomposing her “failed” paintings.
There soon followed a biography, Marion Milner: The Life, by Emma Letley (2014). More recently we have The Marion Milner Tradition (2023), edited by Margaret Boyle Spelman and Joan Raphael-Leff. This collection of essays is part of a series, Lines of Development: Evolution of Theory and Practice over the Decades.
This review concerns the latest monograph from a companion series, Routledge Introductions to Contemporary Psychoanalysis. Marion Milner: A Contemporary Introduction is by the Italian psychotherapists and scholars, Alberto Stefana and Alessio Gamba. Like Milner, the authors have clinical experience treating children and adolescents as well as adults. They are equipped to resonate with and articulate Milner’s comparison of healthy development and psychoanalytic process, and ways analysis can help to rework developments gone awry.
This short introduction is composed of six chapters. Chapter One, “The artistic process as a basis for a model of clinical psychoanalytic process: The discovery of ‘free drawings,’” builds upon Milner’s On Not Being Able to Paint (1950). A self-analysis of her sketches, this project followed the “diary books” she had published in the 1930s as Joanna Field, and coincided with her psychoanalytic training. Stefana and Gamba remind us that in making “free drawings,” Milner was aware of surrealism and such practices as automatic writing. She w