Marion Milner
British psychoanalyst (1900-1998)
Marion Milner (1 February 1900 – 29 May 1998), sometimes known as Marion Blackett-Milner, was a British writer and psychoanalyst. Outside psychotherapeutic circles, she is better known by her pseudonym, Joanna Field, as a pioneer of introspective journaling.
Biography
Milner was born in Kensington, London, as Nina Marion Blackett, the daughter of Arthur Stuart Blackett, a stockbroker, and his wife, Caroline Frances Maynard. She was the sister of Nobel physicist Patrick Blackett. She studied at University College, London, where she graduated with a 1st Class degree in psychology in 1924.
In 1926, Milner began an introspective journey that later became one of her best-known books, A Life of One's Own (initially published under the name Joanna Field in 1934). This started as a journal in which she would note down times that she felt happy and thoughts going through her head at those times, in an attempt to discover what happiness was; however, her introspection branched out into other areas, from an analysis of day-to-day worries to experiences which some reviewers described as "mystical". Milner's basic technique is a kind of introspection, observing fleeting thoughts ("butterfly thoughts", as she calls them) combined with an openness to sensory experience that she calls "wide awareness". A Life of One's Own was well-received, attracting favorable reviews from such literary notables as W. H. Auden and Stephen Spender, and soon afterwards, she published a work on similar lines (again as Joanna Field), An Experiment in Leisure.
During this period, Milner became increasingly interested in Jean Piaget and the work of Jungian analytical psychologists.
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This entry incorporates text from “Marion Milner” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.