Precise Relationship between Mysticism and Creativity

To my knowledge, Milner is the only psychoanalyst whose views of mysticism and creativity significantly overlap. Her work shares significant parallels with that of Batson, Schroenrade, and Ventis (1993), who argue that the difference between creativity and religious experience is primarily one of content and personal centrality, not psychological processes. One of the functions of painting, for Milner (1950), is to restore and to recreate lost objects. However, this is a secondary function. The primary role of art, in her view (1987b), is in the creating of objects, not in the recreating of them. In art a new thing has been created - a new bit of the outside world has been made interesting and significant.

Milner turned to her own drawings to discuss spirituality. A drawing which she called "Rats in the Sacristy," for example, illuminates for her the issue of trying to live as a separate person on the one hand, and on the other seeking for total merging and loss of all separate identity, such as feeling at-one with nature. It is in those moments when one does not have to feel oneself a separate person that the mystical union with the other is discovered. Of another picture, the "Angry Parrot," Milner wrote that the parrot's "fear of losing its egg was in part a fear of losing this other kind of concentration, the kind which both envelops the whole body and at the same time can be spread out in spiritual envelopment of the object" (1950,

30 Creativity, Spirituality, and Mental Health

p. 111). As stated, art for Milner can be seen in terms of its capacity for fusing or con-fusing subject and object and then making a new division of these: "By suffusing, through giving it form, the not-me objective material with the me -subjective psychic content, it makes the not-me 'real,' realizable" (1950, p. 161). For Milner, the importance of creativity and mysticism alike is that they undo the overfixed separation of self and other, self and universe, caused by tyranny of the conscious mind. Whether through meditation or painting, the effect of the "wide unfocused stare" is a greater sense of connection of self and body, self and other, self and external environment. Milner (1987b) relates an experience of Ruskin, as narrated in an unpublished paper by Adrian Stokes, which made a significant impression on her:

Stokes compares Huxley's experiences with one of Ruskin's, described in his diary: of how, as a young man traveling to Italy for the sake of his health and stopping on route at some inn, he felt so ill that he doubted his ability to continue the journey. Feeling in despair, he staggered out of the inn along a cart track and then lain down on the bank, unable to go any further. But he had found himself staring at an aspen tree by the roadside and finally he had sat up and begun to draw it. He drew the whole tree and in doing so had an intense imaginative emotional experience of understanding of all trees, as well as finding that his feeling of being close to death had disappeared. He was able to continue his journey to Italy, (p. 236)

Milner suggests that Ruskin had a "direct sensory internal experience of the integrating processes that created and go on creating the body" - a direct "psycho-physical non-symbolic awareness" (p. 237). She used the phrase "resurrection of the body" (p. 238) in connection with his experience and suggested that those states that are often talked about by psychoanalysts as autoerotic and narcissistic (and thus pathological) can be an attempt to reach a beneficent kind of narcissism, a primary self-enjoyment involving a cathexis of the whole body. If properly understood, this beneficent narcissism is a step toward a renewed and revitalized cathexis of the bound_a

Milner's discussion of the psychological processes involved in mystical experiences and creative expression revolves around the "I versus not-I" distinction. In both instances the boundary is blurred and redistributed. In On Not Being Able to Paint (1950), for example, Milner states that painting has to do with problems of being a separate body in a world of other bodies that occupy different bits of spaces - "it must be deeply concerned with ideas of distance and separation and having and losing" (p. 12). Because painting arouses a fear of losing all sense of separate boundaries, it awakens a fear of being mad. Milner (1956b/1987b) used Blake's illustrations to suggest that the creative process undoes the overfixed separation of self and other, self and universe. Once the sense of a separate existence has been achieved, one must be continually undoing it again, in cyclic oscillation, if psychic sterility is to be avoided.

Marion Milner on Mysticism and Creativity 31

In The Suppressed Madness of Sane Men: Forty-four Years of Exploring Psychoanalysis (1987b), Milner explains that mysticism is one dimension of the creative process:

The state of mind which analysts describe as a repetition of the infant's feelings in its mother's arms, the state which Freud called oceanic, is thus being regarded by certain writers on art as an essential part of the creative process. But it is not the oceanic feeling itself, for that would be the mystic's state; it is rather the oceanic state in a cyclic oscillation with the activity of what Ehrenzweig calls the surface mind, with that activity in which "things" and the self, as Maritain puts it, are grasped separately, not together. And the cyclic oscillation is not just passively experienced but actively used, with the intent to make something, produce something, (pp. 196-7)

Thus, for Milner mysticism and creativity are not identical - creative expression involves greater oscillation between conscious and unconscious minds to produce a work of art. Yet even in mysticism a permeable boundary exists between consciousness and unconsciousness, such that the "I" and the "not-I" exist simultaneously. If the "I" disappeared altogether, she asks, then how would one describe the state as blissful? Similarly, Milner suggests that creativity is found in the interplay of conscious and unconscious modes of functioning - the paradox of creativity is to break down the barrier of space between self and other while simultaneously maintaining it.

The implications of Milner's work are profound. First, it we accept Milner's notion that creativity is inherent in the human psyche - a primal creativity - then mysticism is central to the human experience as well, irrespective of the qualities of the person. In this regard Milner contributes to a democratization of mystical experience: it is key to the evolution of the human mind. But perhaps not everyone is a mystic - further discussion of mysticism is necessary to determine if there is "one" mysticism or perhaps "mysticisms." Moreover, since Milner's work suggests that all artists have mystical experiences, she raises the interesting question of whether all mystics are also creative. At first glance one might answer in the negative; not all mystics produce a concrete product such as painting or music. But that does not preclude the possibility that mystics express themselves in a novel way. More discussion on the nature of creativity will assist in determining the precise relationship between mysticism and creativity. Finally, Milner's work suggests that both mystical experiences and creativity have psychological benefits. Yet, for Milner, it is difficult to integrate mystical experiences in a psychologically beneficial manner in the absence of a healthy sense of separateness from the world. She also agreed with Winnicott that a work of art alone cannot heal an underlying lack of sense of self. We turn now to a broader discussion of the relationship between spirituality and creativity and the implications for mental health.