ABSTRACT
In 1950, under the pseudonym Joanna Field, the British psychoanalyst Marion Milner published one of her several autobiographical books. On Not Being Able to Paint focused on the personal experience and serious difficulties encountered by its author in her effort to become a painter. It is a moving, articulate memoir, which lays out the human subject in the process of finding her subjectivity, a process of both excitement and peril. Milner, whose theoretical work both stimulated and elaborated D. W. Winnicott's groundbreaking studies of early childhood development, introduced from her own experience ideas central to her eventual understanding of creativity and the psychoanalytic process. In linking play to "self-cure" and in inventing an activities programme where artists and craftsmen become intimate teachers to patients-as-students, the Erik Eriksons brought together the creative process and the treatment process. Freely associating between artistic creativity, dream life, and the analytic situation, Christopher Bollas describes a transformational process.
