A Life of One's Own

Author(s) : Marion Milner

Part of Routledge Classics series - more in this series

A Life of One's Own

Book Details

  • Publisher : Routledge
  • Published : May 2024
  • Cover : Paperback
  • Pages : 276
  • Category :
    Psychoanalysis
  • Catalogue No : 97629
  • ISBN 13 : 9781032757551
  • ISBN 10 : 1032757558

Also by Marion Milner

Bothered By Alligators

Bothered By Alligators

Price £27.99

Paperback
£15.29
RRP : £16.99
save £1.70
Usually despatched within 4-5 working days
Free UK Delivery over £25
Add to basket
Add to wishlist

There are currently no reviews
Be the first to review

Leave a review

How often do we really ask ourselves, “What will make me happy? What do I really want from life?” In A Life of One’s Own Marion Milner, a renowned British psychoanalyst, artist and autobiographer takes us on an extraordinary and compelling seven-year inward journey to discover what it is that makes her happy.

On its first publication, W. H. Auden found the book “as exciting as a detective story” and, as Milner searches out clues, the reader quickly becomes involved in the chase. Using her own personal diaries, she analyses moments of everyday life that can bring surprising joy, such as walking, listening to music, and drawing. She also records, in a disarmingly clear and insightful manner, the struggle between the urge to order and control one’s thoughts and standing back to let them wander where they may.

A pioneering account of lived experience that also anticipates the contemporary phenomenon of mindfulness, A Life of One’s Own is a great adventure in thinking and living whose insights remain as fresh today as they were on the book’s first publication in the 1930s.

This edition includes a revised Introduction by Rachel Bowlby.

Reviews and Endorsements

This is what I really want. I want to discover ways to discriminate the important things in human life. I want to find ways of getting past this blind fumbling with existence.
Marion Milner, from A Life of One’s Own

Table of Contents


Acknowledgements
Prefatory Note
Preface

1. First Questions
2. Keeping a Diary
3. Exploring the Hinterland
4. The Coming and Going of Delight
5. Searching for a Purpose
6. Searching for a Rule
7. Two Ways of Looking
8. Discovering that Thought can be Blind
9. Watching the Antics of Blind Thinking
10. The Escape from Blind Thinking
11. Fear of a Dragon
12. More Outcasts of Thought
13. Relaxing
14. Cart-horse or Pegasus?
15. Discovery of the ‘Other’
16. Retrospect

Epilogue
Afterword
Index

About the Author(s)

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

More titles by Marion Milner

Customer Reviews

Our customers have not yet reviewed this title. Be the first add your own review for this title.

Sign up for our new titles email   Sign up to our postal mailing list   Sign up for postal updates