Drawings and Inner Experience

To illustrate a connection between creativity and spirituality, I will examine therapeutic uses of drawing: 1) Milner's writings on Blake's Illustrations to the Book of Job (Milner, 1987b), 2) her analysis of drawings made by her patient Susan, and 3) an experiment in which I made drawings over a one-year period. Sayers (2002) observes that Milner frequently represented her understanding of mysticism through doodling, drawing, and painting, citing Milner's own teenage nature sketches and her adult life drawing, doodles, and painting. Symbolically, Milner uses metaphors of the dying god, emptiness, nothing, and yin-yang to describe aspects of creative processes (Eigen, 1998). The first stage in the creative use of symbols, for Milner, must be a temporary giving up of the discriminating ego, which in turn opens the way to oceanic differentiation. Excessive fear of undifferentiation can prevent ego regression to an oceanic state, thus making impossible a creative use of symbols (Ehrenzweig 1957). Apparently Milner herself experienced terror of the unknown as a primary restriction of creativity. She had difficulty, for example, sitting with uncertainty long enough for the fullness of a painting to emerge into conscious awareness. As mentioned, Milner was convinced that an inner experience of "emptiness" was integral to the creative process. She compare emptiness, or "expectant waiting," to certain states of awareness described in eastern meditation practices. From states of emptiness, according to Milner, moments of transcendence could arise (Dragstedt 1998).