Marion Milner’s treatment of psychic creativity differs in several respects from those well-established approaches to the subject to which psycho-analytic readers owe whatever familiarity with it they possess. She chooses as the object of her scrutiny not the professional and recognised artist but herself as a ‘Sunday-painter’; not the finished masterpiece but her own fumbling and amateurish beginner’s efforts to draw and paint. In short, she analyses not the mysterious and elusive ability of the genius who achieves self-expression through the medium of painting, but – as the title of the book suggests – the all too common and distressing restrictions by which the creativity of the average adult individual is held in check.
It is fascinating for the reader to follow the author’s attempts to rid herself of the obstacles which prevent her painting, and to compare this fight for freedom of artistic expression with the battle for free association and the uncovering of the unconscious mind which make up the core of an analyst’s therapeutic work. The amateur painter, who first puts pencil or brush to paper, seems to be in much the same mood as the patient during his initial period on the analytic couch. Both ventures, the analytic as well as the creative one, seem to demand similar external and internal conditions. There is the same need for ‘circumstances in which it is safe to be absent-minded’ (i.e. for conscious logic and reason to be absent from one’s mind). There is the same unwillingness to transgress beyond the reassuring limits of the secondary process and ‘to accept chaos as a temporary stage’. There is the same fear of the ‘plunge into no-differentiation’ and the disbelief in the ‘spontaneous ordering forces’ which emerge, once the plunge is taken. There is, above all, the same terror of the unknown. Evidently, it demands as much courage from the beginning painter to look at objects in the external world and see them without clear and compact outlines, as it demands courage from the beginning analysand to look at his own inner world and suspend secondary elaboration. There are even the same faults committed. The painter interferes with the process of creation when, in the author’s words, he cannot bear the ‘uncertainty about what is emerging long enough, as if one had to turn the scribble into some recognisable whole when, in fact, the thought or mood seeking expression had not yet reached that stage’. Nothing can resemble more closely than this the attitude of haste and anxiety on the analyst’s or patient’s part which leads to premature interpretation, closes the road to the unconscious and puts a temporary stop to the spontaneous upsurge of the id-material. On the other hand, when anxieties and the resistances resulting from them are overcome, and the ‘sur-render of the planning conscious intention has been achieved’, both – painter and analysand – are rewarded by ‘a surprise, both in form and content’. It is at this juncture only that we meet the essential difference between the analytic process and the process of creation. The legitimate result of analysis is the inner experience of formerly unknown affects and impulses which find their final outlet in the ego-processes of verbalisation and deliberate action. The creative process in art, on the other hand, ‘remains within the realm in which unknown affects and impulses find their outlet, through the way in which the artist arranges his medium to form harmonies of shapes, colours or sounds’; whether deliberate action is affected or not in the last issue, the main achievement is, according to the author, a joining of that split between mind and body that can so easily result from trying to limit thinking to thinking only in words.
Marion Milner’s book is written throughout from the eminently practical aspect of self-observation and expression. Abstraction is relegated to an Appendix in which her theoretical opinions on creativity find expression.
Readers who have personal experience of any form of creative work, whether literary or artistic, will welcome the enlightening description of ‘emptiness as a beneficent state before creation’, and will acknowledge willingly, although shamefacedly, the truth of her brilliant explanation of the confusion in the creator’s (especially an author’s) mind between the orgiastic feelings during creation and the value of the created. Her treatment of this particular aspect of artistic productivity seems to me one of the most rewarding chapters of the book.
With regard to the analytic controversy whether psychic creativity seeks above all ‘to preserve, re-create the lost object’, the author takes the stand that this function of art, although present, is a secondary one. According to her, the artist’s fundamental activity goes beyond the re-creation of the lost object to the primary aim of ‘creating what has never been’ by means of a newly acquired power of perception. There is, here, another correspondence with the results of analytic therapy. For the patient too we aim at more than mere recovery of lost feelings and abilities. What we wish him to achieve is the creation of new attitudes and relationships on the basis of the newly created powers of insight into his inner world.
There is, lastly, a highly interesting treatise on negativ-istic attitudes towards psychic creativity, in which certain inhibitions to create are ascribed to a fear of regression to an undifferentiated state in which the boundaries between id and ego, self and object, become blurred. Owing to this anxiety, no ‘language of love’, i.e. no medium can be found in which to ‘symbolise the individual’s pregenital and genital orgiastic experiences’. These views coincide in a welcome manner with certain clinical observations of my own concerning states of affective negativism, in which the patients’ ability to express object-love is blocked by the fear of an all too complete emotional surrender. Future studies of this kind will owe much to Marion Milner’s lucid explanation of this ‘unconscious hankering to return to the blissful surrender, this all-out body giving of infancy’.
Anna Freud