Marion Milner - A Life of One’s Own

Rachel Bowlby

Marion Milner's Preface to A Life of One's Own begins with a disarmingly simple formal statement of what it is:

This book is the record of a seven years study of living. The aim of the record was to find out what kinds of experience made me happy.

The method was:(a)to pick out those moments in my daily life which had been particularly happy and record them in words.

(b)To go over these records in order to see whether I could discover any rules about the conditions in which happiness occurred. (p. xxxiii)

A long-term scientific experiment or study has been successfully completed. It involved an aim, a method, and a record. Findings were sought in the form of rules and general conditions that the evidence might have yielded. The programme is set out in an orderly way with the two bullet-points, (a) and (b). Milner will go on to refer to the data she recorded as facts: the facts of my own life, and her own selection of these as observations.

But beneath or alongside this appearance of scientific method and objectivity, something quite different is also present. The subject of the study is happiness, and not just happiness in the abstract, or in general, but a personalfeeling, what made me happy; it is about moments and daily life. But while the happiness happenings are short-term or small-scale phenomena, the seven years study, on the other hand, seems to freight the project with history of its own and also with a traditional kind of significance. It suggests a long apprenticeship, a labour of love or love of the labour; or else a pilgrimage that might eventually be rewarded with the prize of truth. The reader is drawn into something that sounds more like a spiritual quest than a formal philosophical enquiry. There is the wish for a guide and the fear that the searching subject might lose my way (p. 11). Throughout the book, Milner speaks of her enterprise and of individual discoveries.

As the Preface continues, many distractions from the straightforward scientific model break in. Milner represents herself as being like a detective baffled by the multitude of his facts; or again, the book is a contemporary journal of an exploration which involved doubts, delays, and expeditions on false trails, and the writing of it was an essential part of the search (p. xxxiii). What she calls my method (p. xxxiv) was open to change along the way, as though reverting to the first principles, first ventures, of the philosophical methodos as a journey. Milner refers directly to the initiator of such a thinking method in his own quest for self-knowledge: Remembering Descartes, I set out to doubt everything I had been taught (p. xxxv). The mention is all the more significant as for the most part, she consciously tries not to remember anyone or anything she has even read, let alone been taught, instead pursuing something like a voyage of her own personal experiential discoveries.