Marion Milner’s Creative Confrontations
Akshi Singh
Marion Milner is an extraordinary psychoanalytic theorist of creativity—one who invested creative work (in its most expanded sense: writing, collage, painting, listening, home-making, clothes, living) with feelings of hope and potentiality. Milner was a romantic about art and creativity, committed to joining romance with the creative act. She shared a sensibility with traditions of English Romanticism, most notably the radical and visionary poet William Blake, whose work she studied and wrote about and who was an important interlocutor in her thinking about clinical work and creative life. She was also a romantic about creative life in a more prosaic, everyday sense. She wanted something from the creative act. She found it mysterious and kept returning to it through her life until the very end, and she imbued this aspect of living with rich significance.
In two lectures given in 1956, Milner read Blake’s Illustrations of the Book of Job, a series of engravings illustrating the story of Job, a devout man whose faith is tested by trials and misfortune, as an allegory of an inner experience of doubt and sterility in relation to the capacity to be creative. In the engravings, Milner saw the very battle we have to go through “in learning how to become able to love and to work.” For Milner, both love and work are steeped in risk and danger, presenting terrains where the boundaries of the self are breached, convictions and certainties surrendered, and where destructiveness, aggression, and shame are close at hand. It isn’t Eros versus Thanatos here, love versus evil and destruction. No, for Milner destruction and evil are part of love.
Job’s sin, as Milner sees it, is to think, as the first verse of the Book of Job puts it, that he is “perfect and upright,” that he “eschewed evil.” It is such self-regard, such delusions of goodness that make creative life, and indeed love, distant and impossible, because all psychic energies are recruited to maintain this idealized self-image, leaving time and space for little else. If we don’t know the worst of ourselves, suggests Milner in her reading of Blake’s Job, then how can we know the difference between the best and worst of ourselves? Instead of resolution, she offers forms of reencountering and acceptance. The creative act is never concluded; it is a process, not an achievement. This is perhaps why Milner is one of the most evocative theorists of difficulty and blockage, a tender and patient poet of quandaries and stuckness.
One of the great psychoanalytic stories is that of sublimation. As Freud tells it, an inconvenience or blockage, most prominently in relation to a sexual impulse, drive, or pressure, is solved by diverting the impulse to another end. It changes direction toward something more possible and socially acceptable, like art or charity. In the chemical process of sublimation, a solid turns into vapor without passing through an intermediary liquid stage. Likewise, in Freud’s theory, there is something mystifying about this model of sublimation as an abrupt psychic detour. There is a bit of magic, maybe a sleight of hand. The concept runs into trouble most notably when Freud thinks about sublimation at a societal, civilizational scale. The suppressed aggression and stifled sexual impulses, all the worthy denials, create a punishing and brutal internal authority in the form of the super-ego, which acts like a “garrison in a conquered city.” It was a trap all along.
Freud notoriously remarked that women couldn’t match men when it came to sublimation. They were “weaker in their social interests and [have] less capacity for sublimating their instincts than men.” In addition to this, they also have a “weaker superego.” This, if true, is no bad thing, given the vicissitudes of sublimation and the superego in the Freudian account. Perhaps we needed a woman, who was also a psychoanalyst, to think creative life in contrast to this Freudian bad romance of sublimation. Milner’s version of what happens in creative life is not the orthodox romance of sublimation, of something nasty becoming nice. Creativity for her is the opposite of sublimation—it is a direct encounter with gruesome, inconvenient, ugly impulses, often represented in her writing by images of fires and volcanoes. Creativity is a plunge into fire, over and over again.
“It isn’t Eros versus Thanatos here, love versus evil and destruction. No, for Milner destruction and evil are part of love.”
It is these qualities, among so many others that we haven’t yet learned to name, that invite a romance with Milner. When it came to writing about urgent and difficult questions in our lives, the losses of those we loved, Marianne Brooker and I found ourselves turning to Milner—Marianne in her book Intervals, I in my book In Defence of Leisure. We found we could trust ourselves to her. Love, Milner writes in her essay on Freud and Blake, is a companion to mourning: “[W]e must be allowed and allow ourselves our griefs, otherwise our joys will be stunted.” Mourning makes change and growth possible. For Milner, creativity and love are always in movement, and feeling stuck is part of the rhythm of that movement. So Marianne and I found ourselves in Milner’s company again, unwrapping folders of her drawings and diaries, encountering her anew.
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After visiting the archive with Marianne, I reread Milner’s essays on creativity and wrote this introduction. Marianne read what I had written and sent her comments. I had the feeling that I was still missing something crucial, a sense of a memory that was just out of reach. I wanted to pick up my phone to search for something, but I’d left it in the other room. My partner was nearby, so I asked—what happened in 1956? Suez, he replied, and something bad happened in Eastern Europe, but I can’t remember exactly what. Then it struck me that just as Milner was delivering her lectures on creativity, both the Suez crisis and Hungarian Revolution would have been unfolding.
In 1956, the Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal, which had been controlled by French and British interests represented by the Suez Canal Company. The aim was to raise money for a dam on the Nile River. Britain and France feared that the flow of petroleum shipped from the Persian Gulf via the canal would be interrupted and planned military intervention, also hoping to depose Nasser and reestablish their imperial influence in the region. Israel, whose access to shipping via the Suez Canal and nearby Straits of Tiran was restricted by Egypt, also saw this moment as an opportunity to invade.
Britain’s invasion of Egypt took place concurrently with the Soviet military suppression of a student uprising in Hungary demanding an end to Stalinist tyranny. There were demonstrations against the invasion, as well as unfavorable comparisons between Britain and the U.S.S.R., as few edifying motives could be found to mask the opportunistic motives for the invasion. The conclusion to the war some months later, with the withdrawal of British and French forces, signified the end of a British global empire, a defeat that emboldened remaining colonies to seek independence.
Milner’s lectures on creativity and blockage are written in this context; the time Milner spent working toward On Not Being Able to Paint and its subsequent reissue in 1957 spans over a decade of the decolonization of Britain’s colonies. Milner started working on the book during World War II. India attained independence in 1947, three years before the book’s initial publication, and Ghana did so in 1957, when the book was reissued with the addition of a new chapter. With this geopolitical upheaval in mind, Milner’s thoughts on creativity acquire another dimension, and her warnings against self-idealization can be read productively as a response to this postcolonial moment. In Milner’s elaboration of her romance of creative work, we can hear a way of thinking about what is available to British people once the grand romance of Empire has come to an end. The self-idealization that Milner finds so deadening is resonant here, its perils apparent.
In the Appendix she added to On Not Being Able to Paint, Milner included a detailed discussion of shit. People can be inhibited from making things, she writes, because they want what they produce to be incredibly good. And the problem of idealization is the problem of shit, of realizing as an infant that the lovely gift you want to give, that you’ve made inside yourself, is actually not so lovely after all. The idealized turd is subjected to a process of violent disillusionment. Anyone involved in the creative act must relive and, indeed, expose themselves to the memory of this primal disappointment. No wonder it can feel like too much of a risk to make something or to tell someone you love them. What if the thing offered is found to be a piece of shit?
When working with patients who experience such difficulties, Milner writes, it helps to arrive at the understanding that idealization “was only a delusion when they clung to the belief that the ‘mess’ was itself as beautiful as the feelings experienced in making it.” When I read this sentence, I can’t help but think of the intense pleasures and romances that went into the making of Empire and the stinking mess that all that activity in fact produced, a mess that we continue to live with and amid. In contrast to imperial hubris, Milner places de-idealization at the heart of the creative process. Alongside the process of de-idealization, she theorizes creativity as a process of merging and separating with an other. There is pleasure and joy here, but it isn’t the enjoyment of self-idealization. Milner may be offering, in her own idiom and manner, a tentative recipe for another way of navigating life after Empire—openness to the other without collapsing difference, a refusal of self-idealization that obscures that other, and a commitment to the difficulty of coming together and separating.
There is a recurring moment in love, and in making something, when you realize you’ve fallen short or gotten something wrong. A moment of recognizing that the shit is in fact shit, that it is of one’s own making, and that it won’t become anything else. For Milner, this is a crucial moment that can’t be bypassed; it exists within the romance that she constructs. And this is the exact moment that the short-circuited romance of Empire and fascism do their best to repress—to insist that the shit is gold, the stink coming from elsewhere. For Milner, without a central place for shit and its recognition, love and creativity are compromised, even lost.
“Milner may be offering, in her own idiom and manner, a tentative recipe for another way of navigating life after Empire—openness to the other without collapsing difference, a refusal of self-idealization that obscures that other, and a commitment to the difficulty of coming together and separating.”
In putting together a folio on Marion Milner, Marianne and I found that we wanted above all to share aspects of Milner’s archive that concern art and creative life. We include here an extract from one of Milner’s diaries, which describes her experience of color and her reflections on sublimation. Readers of Milner’s On Not Being Able to Paint will be able to draw connections between this diary entry and the chapter on “The Plunge into Colour,” in which Milner relates her experience, and fear, of color in painting to the experience of losing the boundaries of the self and experiencing the pain of the other. We follow this with two essays—Marianne responds to the first collage made by Milner, which is reproduced here, and I write about the experience of looking at Milner’s tracings of drawings made by her patient of over twenty years, the woman she called Susan, and whom she wrote about in The Hands of the Living God. In doing so, we return to questions about creativity and love that preoccupied Milner in the full range of her work, the companions of her life as writer, artist, and psychoanalyst.