Creative surrender: A Milnerian view of works by Y. Z. Kami

Abstract

Born in 1900, Marion Milner started psychoanalytic training in 1940, following a trajectory which took her into territory later developed by Winnicott. She was an independent thinker who drew on a variety of sources to explore her own and her patients' creativity. She linked the creative process to psychic health and to the ability to achieve a level of perception that leads not to the re-creation of lost objects but to the creation of what did not exist before. By linking Milner's theory of perception to works by Y.Z. Kami, I draw parallels between a psychoanalyst's perception of the creative process and that process as described and executed by an artist. Milner's lens and Kami's brush both articulate thoughts and feelings about what it means to be human, the condition of mortality and, after Freud, the illusions that sustain mankind through the creation of the gods. This study looks at how the work of an artist and a psychoanalytic thinker can be mutually reinforcing and inter-animating, thereby broadening and deepening the insights gained from both.