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On not being able to paint
(Kirw
York:
Intsrnationdl
linivcrsltles
Prczs.
1973. NO pages. 920 hard-cover.
Xfarion Milner is part of several important She combines stubborn English “traditions.” good sense and a restless appreciation for life’s mystery. She begins Chapter 6 of the book under review by quoting Thomas Traherne: A Secret self I had enclosed within. That was not bounded with my Clothes It did encompass
and possess
S6.93 paperback)
Oddly, we have trouble reaching and tolerating the heightened state we most basically are. It is as if life saves us from burning up by building in dampeners to an originary boundlessness. The trick is learning to work with the tension our sense of limits-limitlessness thrives or breaks in. “I am but am not my body. I am but am not my mind. I am but am not my . . .“: These are the most basic “materials” I have to work with in building personality. What paradox and mystery I must learn to be at home with! In 011 Not Bc~iti,yAh/c to Ptritlt Milner turns her attention to creative block and relates the latter to difficulties in working with the inevitable extremes we encounter when intensity mounts. She charts various anxieties met with as our focus widens and cracks in our armor open. For her, moving through a painting block involves important lessons in learning to tolerate oneself or, at least, in beginning to learn just how intolerant of oneself one really is. She does not try to “bull” her way past limitations, as the latter are often a takeoff point for the most important explorations of all. We move between godlike idealizing moments when something we are working on seems resistanceless and a sort of hangover when we come out of it and up against the flaws of what we were fused with. In anal terms, what we thought was great is now “shitty.” What we were in love with and was once inspiring is now disgusting. In this syndrome we are tempted to “morning after” throw out what we did the night before. Everything seems bad, where before everything seemed good. One must work with swings between over-underestimation and let the work speak to one. Like any other ongoing relationship, it takes time for artist and work to get
or Skin
rare Things.
Throughout her life‘s work she is concerned with the meeting of the bounded and boundless. On one hand her interests are practical. She focuses on body experience, on how consciousness suffuses body, on relationships between body and the space of painting. Yet she draws attention to the awesome expansion our awareness undergoes when giving in to how body life feels. She explores Freud’s dictum that “the ego is first and foremost a body ego” but does so as a living reality, as part of her personal journey, as psychotherapist, as painter. As a psychoanalyst Milner belongs to the Independent British School. She treads her way between once warring factions of Anna Freud and iLlelanie Klein. She is uncompromising in refusing to reduce experiencing to adaptive ego mechanisms or anxiety-guilt about hostility, although she gives these their due. That Anna Freud wrote the foreword to this book suggests how open channels remain between Milner’s dogged pursuit of her own path and the currents through which she finds her way. Perhaps her most fundamental intuition is how fluid boundaries are between I/not-I immateriality-materiality. She notes how anxious we are to dip into this fluidity yet how saving it can be. At bottom, experiencing is orgasmic. 301
x
BOOK
to know each other. Nothing can save one from the discomforts of mutual mirroring. of breaking mirrors. The polarity, ecstasy-friction, is one of the most well written about best kept secrets of creative work. The painter works this out in spatial terms. explores the possibility of experiencing spatially or the space which makes experiencing possible. In my therapy practice I’ve met artists who lose themselves in a space they have not yet created. They sense what must be done but do not know what it is. They get tied up in waiting and reaching. Perhaps they settle for what (‘GU be found, whatever comes their way. They “make do.” Or perhaps they cannot settle and remain tied up in knots, continuously straining. With luck and a combination of persistence and absent-mindedness, something may finally happen which they hadn’t in mind at all. something a good deal less and more than whatever they thought they had an inkling of. One meets this familiar stranger with a good deal of pleasure. a “so this is it” feeling. although the *‘it” may be surprising. One is kept off balance and the off
Gilbert
Drawing from quantum physics, phil~~sophy, and recent psychoanaIytic reconsiderations of the development of the self, this work is sometimes abstruse, but is always a stimulating consideration of the psychology of aesthetic form. Its purpose is to explore the “interface between psychoanalysis and art” using current knowledge of narcissism, object relations and the nature of reality. According to Rose, the world of art is not opposed to the world of science. but both are concerned with the same function-to make comprehensible a constantly changing reality. Modern physics provides the basis for the concept of that any “reality in flux” and the implication
REVIEWS balance moment itself becomes the center of the painting. precisely what gives it life. It is a cycle one repeats in new ket:s apparently endlessly. I believe the appendls to Milner’s book one of the high points in psychoanalytic writings on creativity and have written a detailed critique of it elsewhere /itrt. Rtzi., Ps~ciwrttrt~/.. 1983, 10. 313428). Her work breaks the traditionai analytic framework and is part of a larger transformation psychoanalysis is undergoing. For example. the blurring of boundaries and experiential swings she charts are not primarily derivable from repression but part and parcel of originary experiencing. The latter enters complex relationships with defenses but is essentially undefensive. The sense of being one with yet distinct from the other is a defining structure of the self. In our day, at least in certain quarters, the inherent ambiguity of the .‘I but not-l” feeling has become an expllctt tool of the artist and art therapist. Michael Eigen, PhD In Private Practice New York City
J. Rose
assessment of it must take into consideration the impact of the observer on the observed. Rose postulates that art, and aesthetic form in particular, functions as an organizer of a fluid reality. He describes the effect of creative work as harmonizing the tensions of the mind and its essential dialectic between feeling and thought, fusion and separation. subject and object. Because art, along with myth. religion, language and science, provides forms that help define reality, the concept has implications for psychoanalytic theory. Rose dismisses the polarity of such notions as primary and secondary proeess and postulates instead a more sophisticated and valuable concept of them in continuolls and
York:
Intsrnationdl
linivcrsltles
Prczs.
1973. NO pages. 920 hard-cover.
Xfarion Milner is part of several important She combines stubborn English “traditions.” good sense and a restless appreciation for life’s mystery. She begins Chapter 6 of the book under review by quoting Thomas Traherne: A Secret self I had enclosed within. That was not bounded with my Clothes It did encompass
and possess
S6.93 paperback)
Oddly, we have trouble reaching and tolerating the heightened state we most basically are. It is as if life saves us from burning up by building in dampeners to an originary boundlessness. The trick is learning to work with the tension our sense of limits-limitlessness thrives or breaks in. “I am but am not my body. I am but am not my mind. I am but am not my . . .“: These are the most basic “materials” I have to work with in building personality. What paradox and mystery I must learn to be at home with! In 011 Not Bc~iti,yAh/c to Ptritlt Milner turns her attention to creative block and relates the latter to difficulties in working with the inevitable extremes we encounter when intensity mounts. She charts various anxieties met with as our focus widens and cracks in our armor open. For her, moving through a painting block involves important lessons in learning to tolerate oneself or, at least, in beginning to learn just how intolerant of oneself one really is. She does not try to “bull” her way past limitations, as the latter are often a takeoff point for the most important explorations of all. We move between godlike idealizing moments when something we are working on seems resistanceless and a sort of hangover when we come out of it and up against the flaws of what we were fused with. In anal terms, what we thought was great is now “shitty.” What we were in love with and was once inspiring is now disgusting. In this syndrome we are tempted to “morning after” throw out what we did the night before. Everything seems bad, where before everything seemed good. One must work with swings between over-underestimation and let the work speak to one. Like any other ongoing relationship, it takes time for artist and work to get
or Skin
rare Things.
Throughout her life‘s work she is concerned with the meeting of the bounded and boundless. On one hand her interests are practical. She focuses on body experience, on how consciousness suffuses body, on relationships between body and the space of painting. Yet she draws attention to the awesome expansion our awareness undergoes when giving in to how body life feels. She explores Freud’s dictum that “the ego is first and foremost a body ego” but does so as a living reality, as part of her personal journey, as psychotherapist, as painter. As a psychoanalyst Milner belongs to the Independent British School. She treads her way between once warring factions of Anna Freud and iLlelanie Klein. She is uncompromising in refusing to reduce experiencing to adaptive ego mechanisms or anxiety-guilt about hostility, although she gives these their due. That Anna Freud wrote the foreword to this book suggests how open channels remain between Milner’s dogged pursuit of her own path and the currents through which she finds her way. Perhaps her most fundamental intuition is how fluid boundaries are between I/not-I immateriality-materiality. She notes how anxious we are to dip into this fluidity yet how saving it can be. At bottom, experiencing is orgasmic. 301
x
BOOK
to know each other. Nothing can save one from the discomforts of mutual mirroring. of breaking mirrors. The polarity, ecstasy-friction, is one of the most well written about best kept secrets of creative work. The painter works this out in spatial terms. explores the possibility of experiencing spatially or the space which makes experiencing possible. In my therapy practice I’ve met artists who lose themselves in a space they have not yet created. They sense what must be done but do not know what it is. They get tied up in waiting and reaching. Perhaps they settle for what (‘GU be found, whatever comes their way. They “make do.” Or perhaps they cannot settle and remain tied up in knots, continuously straining. With luck and a combination of persistence and absent-mindedness, something may finally happen which they hadn’t in mind at all. something a good deal less and more than whatever they thought they had an inkling of. One meets this familiar stranger with a good deal of pleasure. a “so this is it” feeling. although the *‘it” may be surprising. One is kept off balance and the off
Gilbert
Drawing from quantum physics, phil~~sophy, and recent psychoanaIytic reconsiderations of the development of the self, this work is sometimes abstruse, but is always a stimulating consideration of the psychology of aesthetic form. Its purpose is to explore the “interface between psychoanalysis and art” using current knowledge of narcissism, object relations and the nature of reality. According to Rose, the world of art is not opposed to the world of science. but both are concerned with the same function-to make comprehensible a constantly changing reality. Modern physics provides the basis for the concept of that any “reality in flux” and the implication
REVIEWS balance moment itself becomes the center of the painting. precisely what gives it life. It is a cycle one repeats in new ket:s apparently endlessly. I believe the appendls to Milner’s book one of the high points in psychoanalytic writings on creativity and have written a detailed critique of it elsewhere /itrt. Rtzi., Ps~ciwrttrt~/.. 1983, 10. 313428). Her work breaks the traditionai analytic framework and is part of a larger transformation psychoanalysis is undergoing. For example. the blurring of boundaries and experiential swings she charts are not primarily derivable from repression but part and parcel of originary experiencing. The latter enters complex relationships with defenses but is essentially undefensive. The sense of being one with yet distinct from the other is a defining structure of the self. In our day, at least in certain quarters, the inherent ambiguity of the .‘I but not-l” feeling has become an expllctt tool of the artist and art therapist. Michael Eigen, PhD In Private Practice New York City
J. Rose
assessment of it must take into consideration the impact of the observer on the observed. Rose postulates that art, and aesthetic form in particular, functions as an organizer of a fluid reality. He describes the effect of creative work as harmonizing the tensions of the mind and its essential dialectic between feeling and thought, fusion and separation. subject and object. Because art, along with myth. religion, language and science, provides forms that help define reality, the concept has implications for psychoanalytic theory. Rose dismisses the polarity of such notions as primary and secondary proeess and postulates instead a more sophisticated and valuable concept of them in continuolls and