ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses Marion Milner’s distinctive contribution to psychoanalysis and shows how it might be used to think about culture as a frame for finding and making objects. Like doodling, humming exists in a space that links inner and outer, subjective and objective realities; the visceral resonance of sound that vibrates through muscle, tissue and bone is also the sound wave that is heard through the ear and reaches out to some external object or other. The distinctive style of Milner and her colleagues managed to combine imaginative empiricism, social ethics and a deep understanding of psychoanalysis. Milner’s intuition that a symbol extends from unconscious representation to all forms of mental activity, and to all the forms in which the subject interacts with the “outer world”, is an emphasis that she makes a space for by transgressing the analytic canon.
