The Hands of the Living God

An Account of a Psycho-analytic Treatment

Marion Milner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780415550697
• eBook ISBN: 9781136844768
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

At once autobiographical and psychoanalytic, The Hands of the Living God, first published in 1969, provides a detailed case study of Susan who, during a 20-year long treatment, spontaneously discovers the capacity to do doodle drawings.

An important focus of the book is the drawings themselves, 150 of which are reproduced in the text, and their deep unconscious perception of the battle between sanity and madness. It is these drawings, linked with Milner's sensitive and lucid record of the therapeutic encounter, that give the book its unique and compelling interest.

With a new introduction by Adam Phillips, The Hands of the Living God is essential reading for all those with an interest in the fields of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy and, more widely, to those involved in therapy and the arts.

PART ONE
The years before she began to draw

1
Her history

It was in the autumn of 1943 that I was rung up by a Mr X, a man of independent means, who was interested in problems to do with mental health. He asked if I would undertake a research analysis with a girl, Susan, aged twenty-three, who was just about to come out of a hospital for functional and nervous diseases. (I will call the hospital N.I.) He told me how his wife had been visiting there and had become interested in this girl and had invited her to come and live with them. Much later, Mr X was to tell me that his wife had become interested in Susan because she was so beautiful – ‘She looked like the Botticelli Venus rising from the waves.’

Mr X went on to explain that although they had invited Susan and she could have left the hospital, her woman psychotherapist, Dr F, had been telling her that she should have E.C.T., and that Susan had been in acute conflict as to whether to have it or not. She had visited him and his wife in their home, but had been unable to decide to come, since to leave the hospital would have meant opposing Dr F. Susan had therefore had the E.C.T. twice, but when Mrs X saw the ‘terrible state’ she was in after it she had finally persuaded her to leave the hospital and come and stay with them. Mr X added that he thought I might not want to take on such a difficult problem but that the main treatment would be the fact that he and his wife were providing her with a home. He also said he would pay for the analysis; he added that before going into hospital Susan had been living and working on a farm for four years but had been unable to accept any payment.

I began the treatment on 17 November, three weeks after the E.C.T. What I saw was a tall and slim girl with a walk like Garbo in Queen Christina and a remotely withdrawn madonna-like face. She began by talking quite freely and gave me a coherent account of her life up to the time of entry into the hospital, five months before the E.C.T.; but she constantly complained that since the E.C.T. something was missing in her, for she had no feelings and nothing mattered any more. Later she said that if I had seen her before the E.C.T. it would have been very difficult to talk, but that now, as she had no feelings and nothing mattered, she could just tell me everything. She told me about her terror of blushing: she had had it all her life. She also told me about her home – that she had lived with her mother and her sister, four years older, and a man lodger called Jack. She thinks she first knew Jack when she was beginning to walk, that he came back from the East then, as he had been in the Army and been invalided out with gastric trouble. As a result, apparently, of giving up the secure background of Army life, when he came to live with them he took to drink and was unable to keep in regular work. He was uneducated and constantly ill with stomach trouble; it was said that his mother had died when he was a child, and also that he had witnessed his young brother being run over in a street accident and killed.

Susan told me how one day she had asked her mother if Jack was her father, because other people had been asking that. Her mother had said ‘No, your father lives in London’ and Susan was pleased about this; but when she then told someone that Jack was not her father and Jack heard about it, he was very angry. In fact it was not until the second year of her treatment with me that she came back from the summer holiday to say that relatives had now told her the truth, that Jack was her father.

She said they all hated Jack; and once when he had gone away temporarily and found work to do with an electric power station her mother had said that she hoped he would get electrocuted. Finally he did leave altogether, when she was still a child, and she does not know what happened to him except that he eventually died in hospital somewhere.

She told me that her maternal grandmother was said to have died at the age of eighteen, when her mother was six months old, from malnutrition, and her maternal grandfather, who was nineteen, had died a few months after.¹ Her mother had then been brought up by an elderly aunt and uncle – ‘good farming people’ but not sympathetic to their baby orphaned niece. It was said that her maternal great grandmother had not been married but had borne three children to a London barrister, Susan’s grandmother being one of them. There was no information about why the barrister had been unable to prevent one of his daughters from dying of malnutrition.

Her mother’s husband, whom they called Pop, lived in London. He had left her mother and older sister Carol some time before her mother met Jack and had gone to live with another woman. Susan said that Pop used to send them a pound a week.

Susan remembered constant struggles over poverty and how ashamed she felt because she had to go to the grocer’s to collect food for them from the parish relief, since if they had received relief in cash Jack would have drunk it away. She remembered being always hungry but that her mother would tell her she was greedy. Her mother used to work in a laundry, and in spite of their poverty she somehow managed to find enough money to send them both to a Convent day school.

Susan could remember her mother having terrible black moods, and she would often walk out of the house and leave them in order to wander about the town. Also in the black moods she would often not speak for days, and sometimes they were all hating each other so much that none of them would speak. Susan also remembers how she would cling to her mother, not able to bear being separate from her; and once, when her mother asked, ‘Do you love me?’ she remembers saying, ‘I love you the whole world.’ Susan also said that the trouble about her mother was that she was sometimes so nice – and added that she had a great love of poetry and would wander round second-hand bookshops, hoping to find first editions; also it was her mother who taught her to appreciate Georgian architecture. But the house was in a terrible mess: it always smelt, there was only newspaper on the meal table, and anyway she thinks they hardly ever sat down to meals together. She also remembers, when Jack was drunk, how terrified they all were and how she and her mother would lie trembling in bed together while Jack, being drunk, would bang on the door and once actually broke the door catch. There were constant quarrels between Jack and her mother, mostly, she said, about her, and soon her mother took Susan into her bed altogether and made Jack sleep alone. She thinks Jack hated her and remembers her mother shouting at him, ‘You shan’t hurt my child!’ She also said her mother told her once that Jack had never liked her.

Susan also told me how her mother always had great expectations for her, that she, Susan, would do something spectacular in life. Susan was certainly an extremely musical child and was said to have played the piano before she could talk; but her mother, who had the idea that Susan should be a dancer, eventually gave her dancing lessons but not piano lessons – she gave the piano lessons to her sister, who was not musical. Susan’s earliest memory is of a hallucinated image of a piano keyboard, also she remembers sitting by the piano trying to feed the kitten at her breasts, ‘not understanding why the kitten didn’t suck’. She also remembers defecating into a pot and showing it to her mother and saying, ‘Look! I’ve done a walking stick’, and her mother saying, ‘Never say anything like that again!’ And she remembers once putting her faeces into an empty cornflakes packet in her dolls’ pram and pushing it about as if it were a baby. Also, later on, staying with relatives, she remembers finding on the seashore a dead rat crawling with maggots and saying she would get a box and post it to her mother; and how the aunt and uncle laughed at her.

The memory that was central in this account of her history was one of two that had been her first thoughts when she came round from the E.C.T. It was of the old man who lived next door; and how, when her mother was out, leaving her alone – she thinks she was about four and her sister was at school – the old man used to expose himself at the lavatory window and beckon to her. Finally she had gone into his house and he used to give her bread and jam and sweets to bribe her to let him masturbate against her; he also used to make toys for her dolls’ house, which Jack could never do. She had continued for a long time going in to him, ‘feeling terrible about it’, but had finally managed to tell her sister, who did not believe her; and when she tried to tell her mother, her mother had said, ‘Don’t tell me – it will kill me!’ So she had kept silent. Later, her mother asked her to tell and then she could not, and this became something that weighed on her mind terribly, she felt she could not hold up her head, and also she blushed. She thinks she has blushed all her life, but it was after this that the blushing became terrible. She remembers that when she finally gave up going in to the old man it was because she had on a new blue jumper and wanted to keep it clean.

When she went to school at about seven she was ‘quite hopeless at everything’, she could not even run after a ball and get it, and no one played with her. She tried paying other girls pennies to persuade them to play with her, and her sister was so ashamed of her that she would not speak to Susan. She remembers too the terror of going to school and her sense of utter confusion there; for instance, she could not even recognize the picture that marked her own pigeon-hole; and she hated boys. She remembers hitting the hand of one smaller than herself against a wall when she was supposed to be conducting him to school.

Sometime during her school years she developed a ‘spot on the lung’ and was kept indoors for months. When she was allowed out again she had to re-learn how to walk. She also told me that her mother claims she did not let either of them walk till the age of two, for fear of their getting bow-legged; and also that Susan had been half weaned at nine months but then put back on the breast ‘because she had whooping-cough’.

Susan remembered various incidents that gave some idea of her mother’s problems in trying to manage her: for instance, that her mother used to say, ‘Nothing is ever good enough for you’, and also how she would cry and cry hysterically for something and then find she did not want it when she got it. And she remembered how her mother twice tried to control her by putting her face close to Susan’s and clawing with her hands and making faces at her. The first time this happened, Susan had run in to the next-door neighbour and told them about it: they had said, ‘No wonder, since you behave so badly.’ The second time, she knew it was done to frighten her, and she had said to her mother, ‘You can’t frighten me.’ She knows they were often terribly rude to their mother, but she feels nobody ever taught them not to be. She also remembers once taunting her mother with the uncertainty about who her father was, and also mocking at her mother’s very inadequate attempts to play the piano, caricaturing her.

Somewhere about the age of ten, she began obsessional rituals of all kinds, and while doing them she became extremely good at school, and also now had friends ‘because she was gay and didn’t care’, but the rituals became such hard work that she had to give them up just before puberty, and went back to being ‘no good at school’. One of the ritual tasks she used to set herself, she said, was to swim out across the tidal mouth of the river near where they lived, to prove she would not be sucked under; she said she always knew the moment when she had gone far enough, but it was a wonder she was not drowned. She now also had a friend, Kathy, a happy gay girl, a bit of a daredevil, who had a good home, and once Susan took Kathy with her on the swimming ritual and there was a moment when Susan thought Kathy could not keep going against the tide, but Susan felt no anxiety or concern, she never did while doing the rituals. Another ritual was to pick up all the pins she saw or crush bits of coal with her foot; and sometimes she had to climb up on top of a wall or walk so many times round the park; or sometimes it would be to do with the way she held her hockey stick, tightly, or touching it a number of times. She said the rituals were all to stop her blushing. During the period of the rituals she was gay and witty and could keep the family in fits of laughing; she also wrote very amusing letters when she was staying away, and much later she told me how she had discovered that her sister, now married and with children, still kept the letters.

She always felt as a child that she was her mother’s favourite and that her mother was very unkind to her sister. When washing up she would put her own cup and her mother’s inside each other and Jack’s with her sister’s. When she was away staying with an aunt and uncle her mother would write to her beginning ‘O moon of my delight’; but also, when in her bad moods, her mother would say that all their troubles were Susan’s fault, meaning, Susan supposed, that she ought not to have been born. Gradually, as Susan grew up, her mother lost all interest in her. After Jack had gone they had twice taken in pregnant women as lodgers, and her mother had become totally absorbed in the new baby; she would not even go to see Susan dance in the end-of-term show at the Dancing School. Susan also told me that she herself used to adore babies and liked to take out other people’s babies, when doing the rituals. Then one day she thought the baby looked at her as if it was frightened of her and it began to cry; she felt the baby saw something terrible in her.

Somewhere about the age of fourteen, she had drifted away from school, she had ‘just stopped going one day and no one had done anything about it’. Soon after this, she had an acute attack of appendicitis, but her mother, who, she said, still insisted on their sharing a bed, took no notice of her agonies of pain and would only say, ‘Don’t wriggle so.’ Finally she persuaded her mother to get a doctor and she went to hospital for the operation.

She said that menstruation did not begin regularly until she was about nineteen.

After leaving school she had a few casual jobs, and then, at sixteen, since she had by now become very good-looking, she got a job, on the strength of her looks, as a show-girl dancing in a well-known troupe. She said she was utterly hopeless at the steps, she always did them wrong, but they kept her on because of her looks. While in London for her audition for the job, she had stayed with Pop, who was still officially her father, and the woman he was living with. She had asked him if he would allow her mother more money, but he had said, ‘Fancy you asking that’; and one morning when she was in bed he came in and tried to make love to her. Up to that time she said she used to pray, but after that she stopped praying.

While in the troupe she met a gifted and sophisticated girl who was known as Jackie,² whose father had bought a large country house – I will call it Beverley Court – with a farm attached. Jackie was leaving the stage and going back to help on the farm, as the Second World War had now started, and Susan persuaded Jackie to let her go home with her; she told me how she felt this was the one thing she must do, so had bullied and insisted until finally Jackie took her home. She stayed there for four years, working on the farm, but without pay. During that time Jackie ‘took her in hand’ and began to teach her things she had never learned from her mother at all, such as how to behave socially, how to use her hands, how to think about the effects of what she did. Susan said she came awake for the first time. Jackie and she shared everything – even clothes – but Jackie was also horrid to her, bullying her to try and ‘make her behave’ and ‘see what she was like’. During all this time, and this became significant later, Jackie’s mother, Mrs Dick, who was a semi-invalid, developed paranoid ideas that Susan was ‘after her husband’. Apparently, all the household loathed Mrs Dick, and Susan was the only one who was good to her and looked after her. Finally Mrs Dick died of a heart attack and it was Susan who found her sitting up in bed, dead. The thought of Mrs Dick was the second idea in Susan’s mind when she came round from the E.C.T.

After Mrs Dick’s death Susan herself developed acute pains in her heart and also constant vomiting. She could no longer work on the farm, but she felt something very important was happening; she was, what she called ‘breaking down into reality’. For the first time in her life, she felt she was ‘in the world’: she discovered that she was in her body, that space existed, that if she walked away from things they got farther away; and she discovered that she had not made herself – this was ‘such a relief’. And her emotions were ‘absolutely terrific’ because here she was getting into the world for the first time, her emotions were inside her and she felt terrific things were happening. But Jackie now withdrew her interest and sent Susan away to stay with an older woman, where she remained for six weeks and was then finally adm...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Illustrations
• Introduction
• Foreword
• Preface
• PART ONE The years before she began to draw
• PART TWO The 1950 drawings
• PART THREE The years from 1951 to 1957 and the background theory
• PART FOUR The 1957 to 1958 drawings and her re-entry into the world
• PART FIVE What followed
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index