ABSTRACT

Writing in The Listener in 1934, W. H. Auden described Marion Milner's first book, A Life of One's Own, written under the pseudonym Joanna Field, as an attempt "to chart ordinary unhappiness", "a remarkable and important book". The book preceded Milner's training as an analyst, and it is precisely this non-specialist ordinariness, which is not ordinary at all, that he applauds. Her clear exposition of the gap between her accepted sense of herself and the person she discovers herself to be through a kind of self-analysis mirrors the Freudian account of how we are constituted by processes of which we are unaware. In Rembrandt's self-portraits, Michael Podro identifies as central the interplay of artist as artist and artist as person, and its replication of the "doubleness" on which the activity of engaging with a painting depends. Bonaminio and Di Renzo draw extensively on Milner for their own description of the continuities between play, dreaming, and the analytic session.