reprinted 2011 by routledge - amazon web...

First published 1937 by Chatto & Windus under the name of Joanna FieldReprinted 2011 by Routledge

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Simultaneously published in the USA and Canadaby Routledge

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© 2011 The Estate of Marion Milner by arrangement withJohn Milner and Margaret Walters c/o Paterson Marsh Ltd.

Introduction © Maud Ellmann

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

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataMilner, Marion Blackett.

An experiment in leisure / Marion Milner (Joanna Field) ; new introductionby Maud Ellmann.

p. cm.“First published 1937 by Chatto & Windus under the name of Joanna

Field.”1. Imagery (Psychology). 2. Leisure—Psychological aspects. 3. Diaries—Therapeutic use. 4. Introspection. 5. Milner, Marion Blackett. I. Title.

BF367.M55 2011790.01′9—dc22

2010051709

ISBN: 978–0–415–55066–6 (hbk)ISBN: 978–0–415–55067–3 (pbk)ISBN: 978–0–203–81676–9 (ebk)

http://www.psychoanalysisarena.com/an-experiment-in-leisure-9780415550673


Contents

New Introduction by Maud Ellmann xiiiIntroduction xliii

1 Memories of hobbies, the over-poweringinterest of birds, animals, plants, seasons. Certaintrivial memories carry a great feeling ofimportance – why? Feeling seems concerned withthe thought of inner fires of the earth. 1

2 Memories of travel, concern with a variety ofthemes – unexplored country, unknown birds,snakes, dry river-beds, thunder, mines, ancient stonemonuments – and the horned beast. 11

3 Interest in witchcraft, I suspect that there is aconnection between this and a present fact ofpersonal relationship – discovery of how deep is theimpulse to submit. 20

4 Images of pagan ceremonial, burning the god.These remind me of an inner gesture I had oncebefore discovered – use of this gesture to combatanxieties by forestalling the idea of them. 28

5 Looking for pictures of what one submitsto – Nature as destructive, a poisonous centipede,destroying Nature within oneself – then how dareone relax from effort? 40

6 Fairy tale: ‘THE DEATH’S HEAD EMPEROR.’ 50PART 1: Little fishes look for a playmate andfind a skeleton in the five-mile depths of the sea. 50PART 2: A lame old woman eats the fishes andis driven to make a shield of seven metals and sailto the Magnetic North. 56



PART 3: The bottom of the sea comes to thetop. 62

7 How should the story end, what will hatchfrom the cocoon, gentleness or fierceness? How toreconcile the opposites of impulse, seeking themagical grip on the lion of desire. 65

8 Finding further terms in which to express myproblem from a modern play, ‘WITHIN THE GATES’. Isuspect that there are other results from theinternal action of submission, besides thecombating of fear, results connected with thefertility of the mind. 74

9 Haunting images from a bull-fight drive me toconsider this possibility further. 82

10 Feeling drives me to study ‘PEER GYNT.’ Ibsenseems to be saying that true fertility of the mind,true imagination, depends on the willingness togive up all sense of being ‘master of the situation’. 90

11 What causes the change from imagination asthe magic slave of personal desire to imaginationas the servant of understanding? Which kind ofimagination is religion concerned with? 97

12 Acceptance of uncertainty as a condition ofnew understanding – need for some support inlearning to accept uncertainty. 104

13 An attempt to review the method used in thisexperiment. Why do such far-fetched mental imagesacquire importance? They seem to bridge the gapbetween thinking and living. They only appearduring special moods – images of fiery vessels bestdescribe this mood. 111

14 More images of death, trunk murders, thedismemberment of Osiris. Is this an interest indeath or in birth, and if birth, birth of what? Aspirit or mood? Or babies? Does the meaning ofthese haunting images come from the inner life orthe outer? I cannot avoid the conclusion that itcomes from both. 120

15 Attempt to review the results of thisexperiment. It seems that my mind’s dominant

x CONTENTS



concern, when left to itself, has been to achieve aconscious relation to the force by which one is lived.Certain drawings seem to be pictures of change inmy sense of the nature of this force. There seems tobe something in my mind which is neither blindpleasure or pain-seeking, nor yet consciousreasoning; this something seems to be activelyconcerned with the truth of experience, and seemsto express itself in terms of images, not argument. 129

16 Comparison with other people suggests thatthere are certain temperaments for whom theseproblems mean nothing, others for whom they arereal. Futility of seeking a way out by trying to copythe ‘men of power’ and taking arms against the sea. 141

17 How does being a woman affect the problem?Possible reasons why it is harder for a woman to becreative in her understanding as well as in her body. 154

18 SUMMING UP: Reconciliation of feeling andreason: I have become certain of the need to attendto the voice of the blood and the bones, but not totake it at its face value. I have been forced toconclude that the laws of the imagination are notthe same as the laws of action; imagination does notyield to the force of the will, either to destroy itsevil or promote its good – but it seems to yield to thewiping out of the will. Alternative Freudianinterpretations of this internal gesture of wipingout the will. Use of this illogical gesture to avoidlogical pitfalls in thinking, and undue relianceupon authority. Need to relinquish all that hasbeen said. 164

CONTENTS xi



11

In trying to understand the alluring quality of the killingthe god theme, I had come across a distinction between twoways in which the mind makes use of mental pictures. Now,in Peer Gynt, I had found the same theme, and in addition,many hints as to the conditions under which the change fromone way to the other is accomplished, the change by whichimagination becomes the servant of fact rather than amirage satisfaction of thwarted personal desire. I felt thisproblem to be of special importance to the weak, sinceimagination in the second sense is a particular danger forthose who feel themselves lacking in sufficient power toforce the outer world to give them what they want. It wascertainly the problem of Peer Gynt, a ne’er-do-weel and afailure; it was also potentially the problem of Telemachus,thwarted by usurping suitors, although his escape from thisinto fantasy is not so directly indicated as by Ibsen; but Ithought it was hinted at, perhaps, in the picture of Penelopecontinually weaving and unweaving her web, a fit symbol forimagination that is merely escape. It seemed also to be theproblem of Christian, though the sense of weakness is hereshown in a more complicated form – a sense of guilt. Hesurely responds to his own need for utter self-subjection, notby trying to escape from it into illusory dreams of power, butby more direct expression in images of destroying flames andthe wrath of God.

But if all these stories were really Odysseys of theweak, what was the real meaning of the end of the strug-gles? For Telemachus the goal seems to have meant the



restoration of his possessions and life at home with hisfather; for Christian, salvation, immortal life with God in aGolden City. But what did ‘salvation’ mean – being saved,safe? What does it mean to be safe? Slowly I began to wonderwhether Peer Gynt did not contain perhaps the clearesthint of what was the true end of all these journeyings andstruggles, of what was the real goal and completion ofweakness. Was it not really to share and inherit thestrength and possessions of the strong, as Telemachus does,and also every woman does who relies on her mate forstrength and support? Was it not really to receive a king-dom that is none of one’s own making, to sit on goldenchairs on either side of a king, as the apostles thought, orto become citizen of some strange perfect city as Christiandid? Was it possible that the only ultimate safety, the only‘eternal life’, was to be an emptiness that could receive thepower of the strong, and with it fashion some new thing –in fact, to be within the mind what a woman is in child-bearing? But perhaps this was what those other story-tellers were actually trying to say in their own way, for thiskind of creation is perhaps nothing that one can do withone’s own will, it is in a sense riches and a kingdom givento one for nothing, or rather only for the measure of one’semptiness. Was then the ‘inheritance incorruptible’ thatChristian set out to find really the immortality of theimagination?

Reminded of what Ibsen had said in his introduction toPeer Gynt, I now began to consider what might be the prob-lems of a poet. I thought how the poet is the first explorerbeyond the frontiers of accepted knowledge of the humanheart; by subtle use of imagery and sound and rhythm, hebrings a first order into the wild forest of raw lived experi-ence. To the blind drifted hours in which we simply livewithout knowing that we live, letting life flow over us in akind of dream in which fact and illusion are hopelesslymixed, he can give form and name. And by giving this, surelyhe can give us power to live more effectively, through beingaware that we live; and eventually, when the armies of organ-ized knowledge have followed up the pioneer trails of thepoets, wisdom can become a public possession; we begin to

98 EXPERIMENT IN LEISURE



know something of the facts of our lives and so in partbecome able to control them, instead of floundering help-lessly in the dark. So it was the nameless poets of folklorewho invented, for instance, the story of Œdipus, but itrequired the patient labours of science before the sameexperience could be put into general concepts instead ofparticular ones. I began to feel intensely how essential is thepart played by the poet in the history of man, how poetry (inthe broad sense, including all the arts) is an essential, not aluxury. For man’s very existence has depended on his cap-acity to know the facts. Obviously it was not until he hadlearnt to know something about the facts of climate and theseasons, of thunder and floods and frost, that he could knowhow to use these to his own advantage and avoid being des-troyed by them. But there were not only external facts he hadto know. There were internal facts, facts of his own impulsesand conflicting desires, and it was here that the poet was thepioneer. I found myself continually occupied with thethought of how often, through not realizing the nature andstrength of their own desires, men have been wrecked bythem.

One day I read:

‘Because an emotion does not exist or does notbecome perceptible and active among us, till it has foundits expression, in colour or in sound or in form, or in all ofthese . . . poets and painters and musicians . . . arecontinually making and unmaking mankind.

‘I doubt indeed if the crude circumstances of theworld, which seems to create all our emotions, does morethan reflect, as in multiplying mirrors, the emotions thathave come to solitary men in moments of poeticalcontemplation; or that love itself would be more than ananimal hunger but for the poet and his shadow thepriest . . .

‘Solitary men in moments of contemplation receive, asI think, the creative impulse . . . and so make and unmakemankind and even the world itself, for does not “the eyealtering alter all”?

‘Our towns are copied fragments from our breast;

CHAPTER ELEVEN 99



And all men’s Babylons strive but to impartThe grandeurs of his Babylonian heart.’1

But if man’s salvation depended on his capacity to seethe facts, both about himself and the outside world, and ifthe poets were the pioneers in this, what were the conditionsunder which poetry could grow? For a long time I had beenpuzzled by the continual recurrence of images from the Biblein my thinking. Then I find this note in my diary:

Just supposing this is what the Gospel story is partlyabout? All this year it’s been growing in my mind, thepossibility that the Gospel story is concerned, not withmorals at all, not with what one OUGHT to do, becausesomeone (God, father) expects it of you, but with practicalrules for creative thinking, a handbook for the process ofperceiving the facts of one’s own experience – and, ofcourse, in this sense, with ‘salvation’, for it is ignoranceand blindness which lead to the City of Destruction. Andthe central truth, is it that only by a repeated giving up ofevery kind of purpose, plunging into the void, voluntarydying upon the cross, can the human spirit grow, andachieve those progressive fusings of isolated bits ofexperience which we call wisdom, truth? How it has got somuddled up with morals, I can’t quite see – except thatsymbols created by great minds are immediately seizedupon by little ones and used for their own ends – as Isuppose I am doing now. For the Gospel story is obviouslya Chinese puzzle-box of meanings – I used to think thatbecause I obviously couldn’t reach to the inner box it wasno good bothering with it at all. But now I know I must useeverything, like a caddis worm I must build my house outof everything I can get, I must fight with the angel of theLord till I force some name out of him, howeversacrilegious it seems; life is too difficult to be squeamish.So to me it seems that it is nursery morals which areconcerned with ‘being good’ and ‘being bad’, with ‘ought’.I’m sure that the moment you are consciously concernedwith being good, priggishness comes in and mental

1 W. B. Yeats, ‘Essays.’




sterility. Real wisdom only grows under the conditions ofutter loss of all sense of purpose, standard, ideal, or ofbeing pleased with yourself for being at least partly on theway to your goal. . . .

But what exactly did Jesus say? ‘I am the Way, theTruth, the Life.’ Lao Tze also calls his teaching a ‘way’, amethod. But how can a person be a way? It must mean ‘myway’. But there are so many people who are always tryingto make one believe that their way is the only way. Whatelse did He say? – that the only certain happiness is insideyou (that I know quite well but always forget it) – that itgrows slowly like a tree from a tiny seed, that it’s worthsacrificing everything for, that you must use what you’vegot, not bury it to keep it safe, that people vary in theircapacity for reaching it. . . .

After writing this I came upon a quotation from Blake,again in Yeats’s Essays:

‘I care not whether a man is good or bad, all I care iswhether he is a wise man or a fool. So put off holiness andput on intellect.

‘Men are admitted into heaven not because they havecurbed and governed their passions, but because they havecultivated their understandings. The fool shall not enterinto heaven, be he ever so holy.

‘I know of no other Christianity, and of no othergospel, than the liberty, both of body and mind, to exercisethe divine art of imagination, the real and eternal world ofwhich this vegetable universe is but a faint shadow, and inwhich we shall live in our eternal or imaginative bodieswhen these vegetable mortal bodies are no more. Theapostles knew of no other gospel. What are all theirspiritual gifts? What is the divine spirit? Is the Holy Ghostany other than an intellectual fountain? What is theharvest of the Gospel and its labours? What is the talentwhich it is a curse to hide? What are the treasures ofheaven which we are to lay up for ourselves? Are they anyother than mental studies and performances?

‘What is the joy of heaven but improvement in thethings of the spirit? What are the pains of Hell but

CHAPTER ELEVEN 101



ignorance, idleness, bodily lust, and the devastation ofthings of the spirit? Answer this for yourselves, and expelfrom amongst you those who pretend to despise thelabours of art and science, which alone are the labours ofthe gospel.’

But if this were true, how was it that I could also read, ina book by a recognized psycho-analyst:

‘Religion, no less than magic, is an expression of thepleasure principle. Like magic again, it belongs to aninfantile level of individual psychological growth, and toan elementary stage of social evolution. Religion – ormagic – when believed in by men and women or by present-day civilized communities, can only be recognized as afailure to mature – in just the same way as the neuroticsand psychotics. In the only kind of complete growing upwhich is appropriate to the present age, the magical andreligious stages should be left behind, as the realityprinciple takes shape and leads to the interest in objectivetruth which we call science.’1

I thought the answer to this apparent contradictionmust lie again in the curious Chinese puzzle-box nature ofsymbols. To say that religion is the same as magic is surely tosee only the outside box, to see that religious symbols havebeen made use of for magical purposes. That religious sym-bols should be so used seemed to me inevitable. If magic isessentially the result of the childish confusion betweenthoughts and things, it is surely natural for the primitivemind to suppose that you can also influence nature in thesame way as you influence people, that is, by words andgestures. If you say the right thing to a person he will dowhat you want; so if you say the right thing to the weather,that is, use the right spell, was it not reasonable to supposethat it also would rain for you when you needed water? Andif you were then taught that there were not many spiritscontrolling what happened to you, not a rain god, a sungod, a war god, and so on, but one God only controlling

1 David Forsyth, Psychology and Religion, p. 183.




everything, then it did not make much difference, you stillcould use your spells, that is, say your prayers properly, andso make sure that everything would be all right.

Looked on as a means for controlling external events,magic from the modern scientific point of view certainlyseems childish. But was that the only point of magic? Ifprimitive men were such fools as some modern scientistsmake out, I often wondered how they ever managed to sur-vive at all. Magic was so universally practised and for solong, was it not probable that it had some useful function,that it was not only a weak-minded and underhand way ofsatisfying your desire for power? Was it not possible thatthere was another reason for the practice of magic, that itwas used not only because of its imagined effect on the out-side world, but because of its real constructive effect on theinner world? If it was admitted that magical practices didserve the useful function of keeping men’s hearts up andpreventing them from being overwhelmed by terror of theunknown forces against them, was it not also probable thatthey played a very definite part in the growth of the mind, bygiving dramatic expression to internal processes of vitalimportance? If this were true, then the power of the idea ofthe crucifixion, for instance, could be due to at least twoquite different causes. One, to the survival of magical beliefin the power of the blood sacrifice to bring actual safety (or‘salvation’) to all who sympathetically participated in it, tocause an actual miraculous interference with the course ofnature; and the other, to the fact that it was the culminatingpoetic dramatization of an inner process of immenseimportance to humanity, a process which was not an escapefrom reality, but the only condition under which the innerreality could be fully perceived.

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