On Not Being Able to Paint [Textbook Binding]

Marion Milner (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0823638200 | ISBN-13: 978-0823638208 | Publication Date: September 1979

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.

--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"[This is a book] that has done so much over the years to bring about awareness of the interplay of inner and outer reality in art and in everyday life." – Janet Sayers, from the Introduction.

--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

About the Author

Marion Milner (1900-1998) was a distinguished British psychoanalyst, educationalist, autobiographer and artist.

--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Product Details

• Textbook Binding
• Publisher: International Universities Press (September 1979)
• ISBN-10: 0823638200
• ISBN-13: 978-0823638208
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #9,424,154 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

27 of 31 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Life-Transformative Book, November 18, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: On Not Being Able to Paint (Paperback)

This is one of my all-time favorite books. Reading it slowly, I learned to see the interplay of relationships in which no firm line is drawn between objects, and so to see beauty. I learned that wrapping my imaginative body around my experience is essential to loving and knowing reality. The author sees her struggle to paint symbolized in her key painting of a parrot, that part of us taught in schools to regurgitate, as it angrily fights to protect the treasure of imagination which lives within us.... She compares the eagle-eye view--wide and expansive-- with the narrow focused view emphasized in our schooling.

34 of 44 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A Mislabeled Intent, May 24, 2000

By 

Cynthia Cox (Brooklyn, New York) - See all my reviews

This review is from: On Not Being Able to Paint (Paperback)

On Not Being Able To Paint would perhaps be better title, Why One Should Paint. Trained as Freudian psychologist, Joanna Field all too painstakingly analyzes her rudimentary drawing and painting efforts in an attempt uncover what ultimately transpires in the process. An ancient quest for sure but depending upon one's knowledge in either the art, education or psychological fields, the road thus traveled is relatively interesting. As a professional artist, I found her all too subjective diatribes tiring, boring, even stretching the limits of believability in the sense that she was able to draw such cataclysmic conclusions from the bad visuals she produced. Her analytical training was obviously taking the upper hand as she "read" so much into own work. However, at the end of each segment, she manages to pull her rantings together for some thoughtful and genuine insights as to what took place throughout her process. Midway through, she departs from her dependence upon the sketches, begins to analyze in a broader, more universal context and salvages the book. She then rather clearly and poetically takes us through dreams, visions, both disillusion and illusion, realizing that, "the inner subjective and outer objective aspects of reality are in a continual state of change and development" and feels that a painter beautifully solves the problem of navigating these (constructed) worlds by inventing a "half-way house between the dream receiver and the external one". She then offers rather keen insight as to how the artist has to "pay" in communicability for this navigational privilege for with others able to share his/her dream, s/he is more "absolved from the guilt or defiance of common sense reality". Of course then, there is the psycho-analytic relation of visual symbols to our sexual development but here her training shines and I found myself thinking of parts of my visual practice in a new light. A colleague, well versed in the history of psychoanalytic development made the astute comment that considering the limited scope of the practice at the time, (she comments on just finishing a drawing at the precipice of WWI), the relationships she manifests are insightful and progressive. Her final strength is her exploration of how this new found knowledge should be boldly carried forth into the classrooms as it would all but revolutionize not only our thought process on the role of visual creation, but our perception of our reality as well. One is deeply saddened however as we realize how we have seemed to regressed rather than progressed in that area in our society's educational role. One absolutely maddening fact however, is the that this current edition omits the a crucial drawing to which she constantly refers on its cover; something the publisher should be taken to task for sure. She ends on a phenomenological note, finding it a pity that the word `reverie' is no longer a part of the language of psycho-pathology for painting, like analysis, provides a safe setting where one can be indulged in its grace and produce the same subsequent and ultimate effect for the person who looks at it. Great for an educator interested in the arts, probably a bit stale for the professional analysts of today and a bit too naive for those in the professional arts.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Milner's theories, April 27, 2010

By 

L. Somerstein (New York, NY USA) - See all my reviews
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Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: On Not Being Able to Paint (Paperback)

Marion Milner's book deserves to be read by students of Object Relations theory and art therapists as well.