Creativity, Spirituality, and Mental Health

in tolerating states of emptiness could arise from the child's early negotiations of separation from her or his mother.

In her article, "Some notes on psychoanalytic ideas about mysticism" (1987b), Milner observes that in her lengthy analysis with Susan, a schizophrenic patient, she remembered an occasion on which Susan produced many variants of a circle. At first Milner attempted to interpret the circle as standing for the breast, but this symbolic equation did not seem to advance the therapy. Gradually, she states, she tried looking at it instead as an ego state and remembered a series of zen ox-herding pictures that culminated in the empty circle. She was then led to think about a "bad" blankness and a "good" blankness and came to see that a "good" blankness was necessary to the creative process (Milner, 1987b). She used the phrase "divine ground of one's being" for what happens to the sense of self "when consciousness does suffuse the whole of the body from inside and all focused images are got rid of, an inner action that seemed to be a kind of dialectical reunion of body and mind" (Milner, 1987b, p. 263). This state is the crux of regenerative emptiness.

For Milner, the central paradox of mysticism is that "I" and "not I" exist at the same time. There must be an "I" in order for the "I" to die. This insight is crucial to understanding Milner's view of the relationship between mysticism and mental health. In The Suppressed Madness of Sane Men (1987b), Milner explains that the basic identifications that make it possible to find new objects require an ability to tolerate a temporary loss of self, a temporary giving up of the discriminating ego. This might be called the "aesthetic moment" (p. 97). If, however, the child has become aware of separateness too soon or too continually, the illusion of union can be "catastrophic chaos rather than cosmic bliss" (p. 101), or the illusion may be given up and premature ego development occurs. Dragstedt notes that for Milner, illusion can be seen as the "device by which the person 'marks off a boundaried space of felt sameness where awareness of paradox can be contained" (Milner, 1969, p. 477). She believed that the framed space of illusion was essential to a number of growth-enhancing enterprises, including painting a picture and the experience of concentration.

In "The ordering of chaos" (1987b), Milner discusses two patients, both with artistic gifts, who had difficulty with symbolism. One (Susan) would say in response to an interpretation involving symbolism, "but a thing either is or it isn't, it must be one thing or the other" (p. 232). The other would insist that the literal meaning was the only possible meaning. Milner notes that both patients had mothers who were severely mentally ill. She explains:

I suggest that such a human environment forces a child into desperate clinging to the phase of thinking that does distinguish between the "me" and the "not-me", because this is the only protection against an impossible confusion between their own and their parents' inner problem.... And the result is that whole areas of their experience become cut off from the integrative influence of reflective thinking. What they are essentially in need of is a setting in which it is safe to indulge in reverie, safe to permit a con-fusion of "me" and "not-me". (Milner, 1987b, p. 232)