How to pay attention

The British essayist, artist, and psychoanalyst Marion Milner (1900-1996) thought deeply about how reading, drawing, and getting better related to each other. 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 century's most extraordinary thinkers about creativity.

In his new book David Russell, Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles, 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.

Milner was literary and artistic; she took herself as her subject. Her writing performs ways of responding associatively to the words and images she encountered. In the process, she found she was a quite different person than she had first thought. In the 1930s Milner invented a form for writing about reading: an original kind of diary book, which is structured by the experience of going back to, and rereading, past diaries. In her interplay of past and present selves, she finds new ways of looking at, and experiencing, the world.

The following extract from Marion Milner: On Creativity is © David Russell with thanks to Oxford University Press. The book is available in hardback and eBook formats, £18.99.

Milner's diaries compile ordinary observations of her inner and outer life. She might note, after a trip to the zoo, for example, seeing 'a little boy in a sailor suit dancing and skipping by himself on his way to look at the sea-lions,' or reflect that 'I realized how untrustworthy I am in personal relationships…always agreeing with the person present'. But in her meta-diaries she allows herself to be 'led by a curious remote sense of intimacy' in some of her 'scrappy observations,' a sense that produces patterns in her observations, and which directs her to some previously unthought preoccupations. She finds she is, like Laura Willowes, increasingly drawn to dark intimations: 'A sudden voice in the dark, fireflies, birds whose ways and songs were strange to me, all these had been heralds of experiences beyond the bounds of anything I knew'. She is haunted by atmospheric images—'Wychwood Forest in the Cotswolds … mistily cloaking the hills across the valley'; 'Wistman's Wood' on Dartmoor—and by the horned gods and ancient ritual with which these places, she found, were connected: 'dark powers of the earth', and the devil. 'These tricks of my imagination puzzled me', Milner comments. 'I was not given to dreaming of fabulous happenings, I had not read fairy tales for years and stories of fantasy written for adults rather bored me. But it seemed I only had to scratch the surface of my thinking in order to slip through to mythological levels'. 

In her reflection on her diaries, Milner discovers she is preoccupied by rituals of renewal and the rites of spring. We could say of her diary writing, as Nietzsche said of his Gay Science, that an April wind blows through it. Encountering her 'mythological levels', and realizing, if dimly, that the 'need to break the barriers of my known experience' had become 'imperative', Milner begins to wonder if she is quite a different person than she had thought: someone with a 'darker instinct'. But if this were so, then what, Milner wonders in a diary entry,

was I to do about it? The implications seemed a little awkward. Was I to hunt for a present-day company of devil worshippers and join their ranks? But I knew by the sense of intimacy in all these ideas that it was not a matter to be put lightly aside; if I had set out determined to find the meaning of what was most interesting, then I must face this question. 

It is in wondering, with a kind of earnest irony, why it is that she doesn't become a Satanist, that Milner makes some progress. If devil worshippers know one thing, it is to whom they are paying their addresses. They would seek occult knowledge, and so confirm the separation of a separate, hidden world from this one. Milner is alert to this logic of the conspiracy theorist in her everyday life. Later in her career as a psychoanalyst, Milner will find many of her patients to be preoccupied by a need to separate a hidden order of things from the ordinary world, and to summon the devil, or some other absolute, in order to affirm one's identity in opposition or submission to it. The very tone of Milner's writing—which can be difficult to describe in its combination of the cheerfully brisk and practical with an openness to truly strange and eccentric experience (she sometimes sounds like Alice in Wonderland)—derives from her commitment to tolerating her own more dark or violent affects, without too quickly resolving them into narratives of shame or self-righteousness. Instead, her writings seek to make unembarrassed use of these interests, according to their aesthetic power.

It is for this reason that Milner finds herself resistant to some more respectable forms of interpretation too: although she is interested in mysticism, folklore, fairy tales, ethnography, and alchemy, she is also distrustful of the genres of explication that risk rushing past their poetry to get to their causes. Such genres include evolutionary science, sociological abstraction, allegory, or narratives of mystic revelation. Faithful to her affinities, she does not suppress or reject as unassimilable her occult preoccupations, even after she has trained as an analyst and become a member of the British Psychoanalytical Society (an organization that would, incidentally, supress its own origins in occult societies and psychical research as a regrettable misstep).

Indeed, it is for the same reasons she does not become a 'devil worshipper', Milner notes, that she does not become an academic. Of her fascination with so-called 'primitive religions' she remarks: 'at one point I had taken the interest quite literally and seriously thought of becoming an anthropologist. But I was learning now not to be quite so simple-minded about interests'. If her daily life is to become more vividly creative, she realizes, this experience will come from the other worlds to be found in her own world, and not from facts to be verified but from virtual states: moods and horizons, orientations in which 'new possibilities' are 'lit up'. In her diary books, she finds her interests shifting 'from what to do with my life to how to look at it', and makes the determination to explore a personal repertoire of images and texts by which she might orientate her attention to a repertoire which helps her to resist, as she puts it, the 'mass-produced' images and media of advertising, political propaganda and Hollywood.

Milner makes a research project of her own fantasy (as distinct from turning herself into a case study). Although she will find her way to psychoanalysis through her fascination with images from art and folklore, myth and literature, she neither subsumes them under any system of knowledge, nor rejects them as atavistic evasions of more grown-up, disenchanted, realities. They offer her ways of seeing. What is remarkable about Milner is how seriously, even after formally qualifying in psychoanalysis, she takes the aesthetic autonomy of her inner life. And these aesthetic principles, as we shall see, become the key to her clinical work. 

But even as her approach to aesthetic relations formed the basis of some of the major concepts of the psychoanalytic movement in Britain, such as the 'transitional space' proposed by her friend and collaborator Donald Winnicott, their literary and artistic, indeed sometimes mystical, origins rendered her suspect to some of her colleagues. She was always, her biographer suggests, relatively marginalized by official psychoanalytic institutions. A former president of the British Psychoanalytical Society, Donald Campbell, observes that 'Milner was more artist than analyst and thus difficult to fit in psychoanalytically'; but he also notes, intriguingly, that Milner's analytic colleagues often turned to her for further treatment, where they had reached the limits of their, perhaps more conventional, previous analyses.

A boon of her eccentricity is that Milner doesn't seem all that interested in curing herself or others—if we mean by that a certain insistence on defining specific problems, and then solving them. She does not focus, in herself or in her patients, on the causes of dissatisfaction and suffering, so much as seek the frames of mind, the kinds of vision, that might obviate them. (One is reminded of Wittgenstein's adage that the way to solve a problem in your life is to live in a way that makes the problem disappear.)12 Her mode of reading is very interested in what we can learn from the movement of attention, but is never anxiously on the qui vive; lacking the sense-making urgency of the academic, the doctor, or the paranoiac, she looks neither for symptoms of illness, nor for reparative purpose. Her search for meaningfulness in life is best understood less as a proposition than as a practice. If there is something she wants to understand, it is how better to appreciate the points at which her inner life makes contact with the world.

What Milner does propose, then, is a more determined attention to practices of mediation—with the question of how people do things with the materials of their life—rather than to identities: with defining who people are, and what made them that way. Her suspension of any need to determine the causes of, or to justify, her own strange preoccupations is her first step towards a lifetime's attention to the therapeutic potential of how people handle the words, images, and other mediating forms that make their lives. Her own prose is attuned to use before signification: she asks the kind of questions that are proposed by a contemporaneous ordinary language philosophy, as when J. L. Austin, for example, notes that 'We seem never to ask "Why do you know," or "How do you believe?"'. Many critical approaches to literature, art, and psychoanalysis—the preoccupations of Milner's life—have tended to read for origins. Critics, as Leo Bersani has pointed out, take a composition and look for its causes. Milner is always interested in starting from the causes we are given, in order to move away from them, towards possibilities of creative composition, and the question of how they are widened or constrained. Her own life's work is in exploration of the way forms of attention relate to practices of mediation.

To this end, Milner embraces the power of occult vision for its sense of excess rather than its mystery. We might say that instead of becoming a medium, she begins a lifelong study in mediation. In the process, she comes to think of her meta-diary writing as an activity in which 'it was as if I were trying to catch something and the written word provided a net which for a moment entangled a shadowy form which was other than the meaning of the words'. As they catch something, words, like nets, also convey an awareness of what they have missed (a net is made of gaps). Nets provide a metaphor for working at the boundaries of one's apprehension, and even of catching things by accident. Thinking of her own writing in this way, Milner finds locates the 'little movements going on in the back of my mind'; she calls them '"butterflies", for they silently fluttered in from nowhere and were gone in a moment'. It is a characteristic image for Milner, because it suggests an activity of noting the significance of something passing through her, but without being in a hurry to pin it down.

Catching—and releasing—'butterflies' allows Milner to break out of the limits of her previous mindset. In particular, she comes to see in a new way what had formerly been experienced, and suffered, as all too immobile: those situations in which her opinions and moods had seemed to her to have 'an absolute quality', and in which any feeling differently from a given moment of joy or fury might seem unimaginable. 'Our moods do not believe in each another', as the essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson once put it. Milner comes to find practices by which she might move from one mood to another. So, in the middle of being in a towering rage with someone, for instance, Milner might catch 'a little far-away voice hinting at the back of my mind that my tears were not quite uncontrollable, that I was really staging the emotion in order to prove something to myself—or perhaps in order to get something from the other person'. Reflecting on 'a butterfly caught in a moment of acute emotion, remembered and written down later', she finds a wish in herself to 'give a lot of people a lot of trouble':

so that I began to feel I understood those children who figure in police courts for having vented their outraged feelings in truancy and stealing. I began to realize what a lot there was to be learnt about the unrecognized parts of oneself from observation of unhappy children. For instance, I once found myself making a quite unnecessary fuss over some difficulty, and managed to catch the idea that if I showed enough distress someone would come and help me.

Milner does not mention here that she was employed in her early twenties as an assistant to the psychology professor Cyril Burt on a study of 'the young delinquent' in East London, a fact which makes it all the more striking that she finds herself able to identify with the protest of the 'unhappy children' before she is seduced by the authority of the official researcher. 

It is through these reflections that Milner discovers the power of a mode of thinking and perceiving that she calls 'wide attention', which she finds more like the waiting and watching that is required in the observation of nature than the 'narrow attention' of focused ratiocination used to solve a problem. She suggests that Rodin's thinker, making 'such a to-do about his thinking', is for her an inadequate image for cognition: 'for me, at least, a more appropriate figure would have been a still watcher in the woods' who frames or composes the scene before her and attends to its unfolding. She comes to wonder if her real discovery is not of any fixed proposition but of a moving pattern: that 'there might be a rhythm of thinking just as there is a rhythm of the heart beat' and that a 'strong push forward' in thought must have its complement in 'the need to stand aside for the inflow'.