The Hands of the Living God: An Account of a Psychoanalytic Treatment

"One of the reasons I turn to a twentieth-century psychoanalyst is that I see in Milner’s work an inheritance of this essayistic, tactful tradition. This is also more broadly true of those psychoanalysts around her, known as the ‘Middle Group’, including D.W. Winnicott and Wilfred Bion. These thinkers respond to the influence of psychoanalytic theory arriving in Britain from Germany and Austria. So before, during and after the Second World War in Britain, we have a group of psychoanalytic thinkers who take aesthetic experience very seriously as part of any model of psychological health. They’re prone to approach mental suffering according to questions of whether people feel they have a sufficient capacity for play and creativity in their lives. We see a rich example of how art, psychology, ethics and even politics all stem from a literary tradition. They weren’t trammeled by overly narrow ideas of scientific rigor. They were suspicious of the way that we can reduce experience through a need for certainty. Indeed, they viewed it as one of the sources of human suffering. “They were suspicious of the way that we can reduce experience through a need for certainty. Indeed, they viewed it as one of the sources of human suffering.” I could have chosen any of Milner’s books. She starts out as an essayist in the 1930s with a couple of books about diary-keeping, which have been compared to Woolf and other modernists thinkers. She then trained as a psychoanalyst. She’s best known, perhaps, for a book she wrote called On Not Being Able To Paint (1950), which is all about her own investigation of the sources of her own creativity through techniques of free-drawing. It’s fascinating. The particular book I chose is an account of a long case history between Milner and a very unwell woman she names ‘Susan’, who relatively early on in the treatment isn’t benefitting from the cleverness of psychoanalysis and its theories. Together, Milner and Susan change tack. By communicating through drawing, they approach more fundamental questions about what it feels like to be in the world. It really does. It’s a modification of its Biblical origin as if to suggest, we’re in the world—there’s no cure for that. We’ll never be able to escape the responsibility of having our life and others’ lives in our hands; that’s both a strain and a pleasure. But to attempt to evacuate the whole question to search for forms of certainty that will inoculate us against other people is so much worse. Yes, that’s a great way of putting it. What Milner and Susan together call “finding a baseline for one’s existence”, or what Winnicott calls “somewhere to be going on from.” This embodied sense of one’s own place in the world with others is not something that comes naturally; in fact, it’s part of our personal history that we’ve developed this feeling. Well, one of the questions of the book is that if someone is suffering from the lack of a capacity for spontaneity, how can they gain it? It’s a very difficult and fascinating question. Milner has interesting insights about this. One is her concern with how we define and cultivate the space between people. This insight leads to what Winnicott would later call “transitional space”: the quality or the richness of an area of interaction of which, if we only think of people as sealed-off individual units, we never gain any sense of this. I would say she makes wonderful uses of a profound literary tradition. Everybody should read her. Her prose style is warm, accessible and surprising all at once. Her thinking about the way we can take seriously the quality of our own daily experience and its joys, its forms of pleasure. One of the great Romantic sources for Milner was Blake. The question central to both of how important it is to feel joy, and how it’s a basis for social and political ideas, is extremely timely today."