Chapter 2 Marion Milner on Mysticism and Creativity

The relationship between spirituality and creativity is explored in detail by British psychoanalyst Marion Milner. I begin here because, as mentioned, Milner's work is where my own investigation into their relationship began. Unlike D.W. Winnicott, her contemporary and friend, Milner has yet to be read widely by scholars of theology and religious studies. Like Winnicott, her work lends itself well to the study of religious symbolism; also like Winnicott - a pianist - Milner was an accomplished artist. In addition, Milner wrote extensively about the nature of creativity, and to some degree, its relationship to transcendence.

Milner's Interest in Spirituality and Creativity

Marion Milner's life spanned the major part of the twentieth century. She was born in London in 1900 as Marion Blackett, in a family of modest means. Since an excellent biography can be found elsewhere (Dragstedt, 1998), I will limit myself primarily to discussing her intellectual interests and career pursuits. When she was seventeen, Milner left school and obtained a position teaching a young boy how to read. The position was extremely fortuitous, in that Milner's work with the boy sparked her interest in how individuals discover the ability to concentrate. Milner later obtained a university degree in psychology and physiology at University College, London. Upon graduation she commenced aposition in vocational guidance and mental testing for the Vocational Guidance Department of the National Institute of Industrial Psychology. Two years later Milner began writing a diary exploring her own thinking processes, published in 1934 as A Life of One's Own (under the pseudonym Joanna Field). A second book, An Experiment in Leisure, was written while she was on leave from a project investigating the educational system of the Girls' Public Day School Trust. Like the first, this book also examines the unconscious processes of her own mind. Milner's third book, The Human Problem in Schools (1938), resulted from the aforementioned school project.

Upon returning to the school project, Milner entered into part-time psychoanalysis with Sylvia Payne. This choice of analyst, in her words, put her "neither in the analytic stream led by Anna Freud nor in that led by Melanie Klein, for I did not even know that there was a deep controversy both in theory and practice between these two pioneers of the psychoanalysis of children" (Milner 1987b, p. 6). In 1939, the outbreak of the war put a moratorium on Milner's work in schools, and during this period she wrote her fourth book, On Not Being Able to Paint (1950). This work is an extension of many of her earlier ideas, and it