Marion Milner : On Creativity

David Russell describes his experience of reading Marion Milner's writings and sketches on creativity. The book introduces Milner's unique body of work, which acts at the interface of literature, art, and psychoanalysis. Milner explored how people could feel responsive to their own lives through creative practices of attention.

This is a book about reading, drawing, and getting better—and what they have to do with one another. Specifically, it is about how these activities were put into relation by the British essayist, artist, and psychoanalyst, Marion Milner (1900-1996). The guiding question of Milner''s life was of how people come to feel alive in, and feel creatively responsive to, their own lives. In pursuit of this, Milner explored fields as diverse as anthropology, folklore, education, literature, art, philosophy, mysticism, and psychology. She became one of the twentieth centurys most extraordinary thinkers about creativity.David Russell shows that there is no writer quite like Milner and the rewards of reading her are immense. Key to all her writing is her search for creative practices of attention—of how we pay attention in the life we have. She helped to develop a kind of psychoanalysis in Britain that focussed on the ways people relate to their own lives and the lives of others.