Chapter Six. Art, Creativity, and the Potential Space

The study of the aesthetics of the analytic encounter has become a distinguishing feature of much post-Kleinian thinking in the British School. This chapter will explore the insights of Milner and Winnicott, who both emphasize the role of creative and aesthetic experience in fostering psychic growth in both patient and analyst.

Milner's oeuvre is especially significant, for it can be viewed as an index of the way in which the psychoanalytic encounter has been seen increasingly in terms of aesthetic value, not solely as the resolution of instinctual conflict and neurosis. Like that of Stokes and Bion, it can be regarded very much as the expression of her personality. Indeed, her theoretical contribution is perhaps most fully appreciated when seen in the context of her own creative explorations and her autobiographical writing: in particular, the account of her painting activities and “doodle drawings” in On Not Being Able to Paint (1950), with its later appendix (1957) reviewing her struggles in the light of her subsequent analytic experience. Her writing then becomes increasingly preoccupied with what she calls (after Nietzsche) the “sagacity of the body”,1 as she explores the epistemological role of certain aspects of corporeal experience by