ABSTRACT
Writing in The Listener in 1934, Auden described Marion Milner's first book, A Life of One's Own (1934), 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. Auden [chapter seven] reads approvingly Milner's insistence that this can be not only a dismaying but an exhilarating process. Two aspects he singles out remained central throughout Milner's long life: "that the expression of thought in words, becoming aware of it, was the beginning of a process of development and enrichment. . . and that the unconscious is . . . a source of creative wisdom; there is an instinctive sense of living, if it is trusted; a trust, however, quite different from blind ir rationalism." Milner's interest in the positive aspects of symbolism and the value and necessity of illusion inform 2a clinical practice that always stressed the potential freedom to explore offered by and within the boundaries of the session. This is returned to, directly or indirectly, by other contributors to this volume as part of the more general questions that reading Milner encourages: why art matters, and, more especially, why and how art matters to psychoanalysis. The ongoing work and, it could be said, play of the mind in a series of real and imaginary engagements with others makes for a sort of continuum between the work of the figure Freud called the "creative artist", the work of the consulting-room, the responses of the audience for art works, and the capacity for satisfactions in ordinary lives that also depends on the almost infinite potential for creating new objects (Green, 1997, p. 1083). On the other hand, there are also differences in these forms of work, play, and creative living, and the papers collected here pursue those differences through what happens in the spaces of the consulting-room and the relationship of clinician and analysand lived out there [Bonaminio & Di Renzo]; through the mapping of the artist's engagement with his/her chosen medium and the early experiences of the baby [Wright]; through the meeting place established in the triangular relationships set up between text, artist, and reader/viewer; and through the commitment to engaging with what particular texts have to offer [Podro, Phillips, Bowie, Fielding]. These experiences and their different settings all engage an intermediate meeting place—the transitional space—where a quality of experience offered can add substantially, for those who can use it, to the pleasures of both satisfaction and consolation that living can hold. It is the creation and use of the concept of transitional space that distinguishes Donald Winnicott's contribution to the discussion of psychoanalytic technique, to the work of the artist, and to living as a creative activity available to all.
