ABSTRACT
Chapter 2 explores On Not Being Able to Paint (1950), Milner’s study of painting, drawing, creativity, and its impediments. Written and published some years after Milner first started practicing as a psychoanalyst, this chapter considers Milner’s autobiographical cure at the site of visual expression. In her experiments with painting and free associative drawing, Milner attends to the relational world of the painter for what it can tell her about her earliest relationships and its subsequent shaping of her adult psyche. Through drawing and painting experiments, Milner develops the concepts of the “pliable medium” and the “frame,” terms that describe the attuning capabilities of visual mark-making. This chapter illuminates how Milner’s self-explorations at the site of drawing go on to influence her clinical work with her patients and how her analytic technique extends to encouraging her patients’ own acts of drawing both inside and outside the consulting room.
