On Not Being Able to Paint

Marion Milner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780415550765
• eBook ISBN: 9781136844836
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Creative Ability in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Milner's great study, first published in 1950, discusses the nature of creativity and those forces which prevent its expression. In focusing on her own beginner's efforts to draw and paint, she analyses not the mysterious and elusive ability of the genius but – as the title suggests – the all too common and distressing situation of 'not being able' to create.

With a new introduction by Janet Sayers, this edition of On Not Being Able to Paint brings the text to the present generation of readers in the fields of psychoanalysis, education and all those, specialist and general audiences alike, with an interest or involvement in the creative process and those impulses impeding it in many fields.

Index

Abilities, lost, recovery of xv

Absent-mindedness xiii, 8, 9, 191

Abstraction xiv

Abyss 29, 35, 114

Accident 7, 16, 151, 184

Accidental, dominance of 70

Action 84;

v. contemplation 163;

contemplative 163, 179;

deliberate xiv;

in drawings 38, 41;

and imagination 149;

imaginative perception of 19;

of picture 125;

and thought 86

Activity:

artist’s fundamental xv;

creative, will and 121–2;

free 119–20;

method of control 120;

and purpose 101

Activity-between 148

Adult life 13, 164, 192

Aesthetic:

experience 6, 152;

pleasure 6;

theory xix

Aesthetics xxii;

logic and 188

Affection 34, 35

Affects xiv, 181

Aggression, aggressiveness 43, 48;

in children 178;

control of 79

Aim, primary, of artist xv

Alice in Wonderland xxxii, xxxiii, 5, 6, 107, 190

Allegiance, divided 25

Amateur painter xiii;

see also Sunday-painter

Ambivalence 175

Anal phase 174

Analysand, need of courage xiv, 42;

see also Patient

Analysis, result of xiv;

see also Psycho-analysis

Analyst 136, 139, 144, 187;

anxiety in xiv;

non-reaction of 139;

patient and xxi

Anger xxxii, 5, 20, 49, 56, 58;

and experimental painting 20;

see also R...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Illustrations
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Note to second edition
• New introduction
• I The emergence of the free drawings
• II The content of the free drawings
• III The method of the free drawings
• IV The use of the free drawings
• V The use of painting
• Bibliography to first edition
• Bibliography to second edition
• Description of original drawings
• Index