Marion MilnerReseñas

How to lead a meaningful life.

On Not Being Able to Paint is divided into five sections, the first four all relating to Free Drawing. The fifth and final section is focused on painting. Words like "psychic creativity" and "moral education" are thrown around, which makes me think I'm in for the psychobabble ride reading of my life. I wasn't disappointed. There is a fair amount of deep psychology in On not Being Able to Paint. Even though the slim volume is less than 200 pages, it took me forever to read. In the end, I questioned if the obstacles which prevent one from painting are not the exact same "blocks" writers sometimes complain of experiencing when unable to write. Sure enough, Field is connecting free drawings with the self conscious.
As an aside, the first edition of On Not Being Able to Paint was written for educators. The second edition (my version) includes an appendix and Anna Freud's foreword. I appreciated that Field was able to recognize that emotional drawing is not completely devoid of influence and that she shouldn't be so fixated on depicting beauty for beauty's sake.
Confessional: I was a bit disappointed by Field's "art." The illustrations were childlike and well, for lack of a better word, weird. As Field explains, and I said earlier, they are "free drawings" that helped her connect to the self conscious. I hope she was successful.

I found this book an interesting and challenging psycho-analytic journey through one artist’s attempts to define and unlock her own creativity. The analysis side bordered on oversharing, I thought, but clearly the process of analysing her own ‘free-drawings’ was an important part of the overall experience that Milner went on through the course of her own experiment in creativity.

Not as compelling as the first time I read it. That says more about me than about the book, though. I'm at a different place in my life, and not as able to relate as when I was younger.

This extraordinary book of self-analysis was first published in London in1936. The author, who had had a conventional training in psychology, resolved to discover what lay behind her own psychological inadequacies. Starting in 1926 she kept a diary of her thoughts and feelings which proved of great help in her inner journey. Stephen Spender is quoted as having said that the book was "a socil document of value, because there are many men and women today in exactly the same predicament as that of Joanna Field.

A detailed account of a case study of someone too divided within herself. In the treatment, lasting over 20 years, 'Susan' suddenly and spontaneously discovered the capacity to do doodle drawings. It was partly for this reason and also in order to clarify, both for herself and for others, what she was learning from her patients that Marion Milner wrote the book. But the ultimate stimulus came from the drawings themselves, with their deep unconscious perception of the nature of the battle between sanity and madness.