March 21 – April 20, 2024

March 6 – April 20, 2024

“Before the problem of the creative artist,” Freud famously declared in an essay on Russian literature, “analysis must, alas, lay down its arms.” Our creative potential—as it is expressed in the most ordinary dream or jokes, or in the extraordinary compositions of great artists—has always been a vital theme in psychoanalysis, but it has also been an elusive one. Freud himself, although he was interested in art and literature, knew he was better at diagnosing sources of suffering than sources of inspiration. People in mental pain, whether from depression, obsession, or panic attacks, may present similar symptoms, but everyone is creative in her own way. Creativity is difficult enough to describe, let alone prescribe.

Born in London in 1900, Marion Milner was part of a group of British psychoanalysts who put creativity at the center of their theory and practice. Her friend and colleague D. W. Winnicott, for instance, considered it the analyst’s role to encourage patients’ capacity for creative and playful living, rather than to interpret the hidden meanings of their psyche. Another member of this group, the extraordinarily learned Masud Khan, insisted on the relevance of literature to any psychological knowledge. What makes Milner distinctive, however, is that she approached her therapeutic project by way of her own creative explorations in literature and visual art. She began her career as a writer and an amateur artist while working a more conventional day job as an industrial and educational psychologist, and she did not train in Freudian psychoanalysis until she was well into midlife. But it was by bringing the perspective of the creative artist to her practice of psychoanalysis (and not the other way around) that she came to offer lasting insight.

Milner’s earliest writings stem from her feeling, as she put it in her first book, that she was—despite her cultured life, promising career, and many friends—“shut away from whatever might be real in living.” She responded by way of an “experiment” in finding a “way by which each person could find out for himself what he was like, not by reading what other people thought he ought to be, but directly, as directly as knowing the sky is blue and how an apple tastes, not needing anyone to tell him.”

Since 1926, Milner had been writing diaries in which she recorded her impressions of life in ways that seem ordinary enough. She would, for example, note seeing “a little boy in a sailor suit dancing and skipping by himself on his way to look at the sea lions,” or reflect, “I realized how untrustworthy I am in personal relationships … always agreeing with the person present.” But in the thirties Milner turned her diaries, as a sort of raw material, into her first books, which were published as essayistic reflections about her diaries: A Life of One’s Own (1934) and An Experiment in Leisure (1937). In them she invented something new and a genre of her own: a diary about a diary, or what the critic Hugh Haughton has called a “meta-diary.” Contemporaries like W. H. Auden responded with enthusiasm.

New doc Girls State explores the current, hyper-polarised moment in US politics

March 1 – April 20, 2024

March 8 – April 20, 2024

Why the hands in Berthe Morisot's The Cradle are groundbreaking

'As an artist, I want to tell my story of the times – what I've lived through'

Frank Prentice on the night he never forgot

Israel and its allies were scrambling to shoot down a fleet of Iran-launched drones on Saturday evening, according to both countries’ militaries, in a major escalation of a regional conflict sparked by the Israel-Hamas war. Iranian state media claimed that the country was coordinating the drones with a barrage of ballistic missiles.

The unfolding aerial attack comes in retaliation for Israel’s strike on an Iranian embassy in Syria earlier this month. Israel’s war cabinet held emergency meetings as President Biden cut short a weekend trip to Delaware to huddle with officials in the White House Situation Room. Flight tracking websites were reporting widespread airspace closures across multiple countries in the region as Israeli officials confirmed efforts to intercept the weapons before they entered Israeli territory, according to the New York Times. The exact targets of the offensive remained unclear.

Iran said that the April 1 attack on its consular facility in Damascus killed seven military advisers, including three top commanders, and in the weeks since, according to Reuters. Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, vowed retaliation, saying Israel “must be punished and shall be.” As recently as Friday, when asked to assess how close Iran was to attacking Israel, President Biden said “my expectation is sooner than later.” As of early Saturday evening in the United States, the US claimed to be shooting down incoming Iranian drones, as television images showed the night sky above Israel lighting up with what appeared to be intercept fire.