The Milner Method: Marion Milner and Alison Bechdel's autobiographical cures

ABSTRACT

This article explores the British psychoanalyst and autobiographer Marion Milner’s (1900–1998) methods for self-analysis through diary-keeping, writing and drawing, and seeks to draw out the connections between her methods and Alison Bechdel's psychoanalytically informed graphic memoir Are You My Mother? (2012). Both authors grapple with the differences between what a ‘couch analysis’ can do for them, and what another method for doing internal work, one that is conducted via the ‘making of “marks on paper”’ in various different ways can achieve. Bechdel and Milner’s visual and verbal mark-making will be explored in how it helps them provide for themselves a sense of ‘continuity of being’, or a more solid sense of self and individuality, that since infancy is felt to be lacking.

KEYWORDS:

• Marion Milner
• Alison Bechdel
• psychoanalysis
• visual-verbal life narratives

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Winnicott explains this concept in his paper ‘The Theory of the Parent-Infant Relationship’ (1960). He writes that with good-enough maternal care the infant ‘begins to build up what might be called a continuity of being … the inherited potential gradually develops into an individual infant. If maternal care is not good enough then the infant does not really come into existence … instead the personality becomes built on the basis of reactions to environmental impingement’ (1960, 594).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Consortium for the Humanities and the Arts South-east England (CHASE), part of the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC).

Notes on contributors

Emilia Halton-Hernandez

Emilia Halton-Hernandez is a doctoral researcher and tutor at the University of Sussex, whose research is funded by CHASE doctoral training partnership. Her writing has been published in journals including Free Associations and Psychoanalysis and History. She is currently writing about the work of the experimental diarist, painter and psychoanalyst Marion Milner. More broadly she is in interested in life writing, word/image studies and object relations psychoanalysis.