Marion Milner - On Not Being Able to Paint

On Not Being Able to Paint

Milners great study, first published in 1950, discusses the nature of creativity and those forces which prevent its expression. In focusing on her own beginners 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.

Marion Milner (19001998) was a distinguished British psychoanalyst, educationalist, autobiographer and artist.

Janet Sayers is Professor of Psychoanalytic Psychology at the University of Kent in Canterbury where she works as an NHS psychotherapist. Her books include Mothering Psychoanalysis (1991), Freudian Tales (1997), Kleinians (2000), Freuds Art (2007), and recent completion of a biography of Adrian Stokes.

Emma Letley is a writer, academic and psychoanalytic psychotherapist, trained with the Arbours Association, and practising in Notting Hill Gate and at Kings College London. She is the biographer of Marion Milner.

On Not Being Able to Paint

Marion Milner

New introduction by Janet Sayers

Series Editor: Emma Letley

Literary Executors: John Milner and Margaret Walters

LONDON AND NEW YORK

First published 1950 by Heinemann Educational Books Ltd
Reprinted 2010 by Routledge
27 Church Road, Hove, East Sussex BN3 2FA

Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
270 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa business

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2010.

To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledges collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.

2010 The Estate of Marion Milner by arrangement with John Milner
and Margaret Walters c/o Paterson Marsh Ltd.
Introduction Janet Sayers

Paperback cover design by Andrew Ward

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical
or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including
photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or
retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

This publication has been produced with paper manufactured to strict
environmental standards and with pulp derived from sustainable forests.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Milner, Marion Blackett.
On not being able to paint / Marion Milner ;
edited by Emma Letley.
p. cm.
Originally published: London : Heinemann, 1950.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Painting. 2. Creation (Literary, artistic, etc.)
I. Letley, Emma. II. Title.
ND1140.M5 2010
750.19dc22
2010025616

ISBN 0-203-83365-1 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 9780415550765 (hbk)

ISBN 9780415550789 (pbk)

To my son and his generation and may they not take as long as
I have in finding out about these matters