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In her work with Simon, Milner was struck by the different tones Simon would adopt towards her and the toys and how this shifted over the course of the session. At the beginning he was bullying, but as he played with the toys, this changed and he spoke to her in a friendly, considerate way. She linked this to his attitude to the toys, ‘a pliable medium’ outside himself but provided by her. As he could use them as he wished, this seemed to enable a different relation to her, and to himself. It highlighted a reciprocal relation between self and environment as part of internal change. Milner proposed that “the basic identifications that make it possible to find new objects, to find the familiar in the unfamiliar, require an ability to tolerate a temporary loss of sense of self, a temporary giving up of the discriminating ego which stands apart and tries to see things objectively and rationally and without emotional colouring” (Milner 1987, p. 97). Anne Alvarez (1996) proposes that for Winnicott and Milner, the transitional object carries the meaning of that which is yet not the other and that which is and is not the self. Accordingly, Simon discovered the boundaries of the self through the freedom he found in his sessions to explore the boundaries between him and Milner. The environment/analyst facilitates a necessary initial oneness by the consistent provision of a framed space and a pliable medium where no decision is necessary about what is self and other; the establishment and awareness of objects by the infant precedes any attempts at repairing them. Awareness of the external world is itself seen as a creative process, “a complex creative interchange between what comes from inside and what comes from outside, a complex alternation of fusing and separating” (Milner 1950; 2010, p. 171) Abandoning an insistence on a rigid separation between me and not me in the arena which Winnicott calls ‘transitional’, leads to acceptance of Me and Not Me as coexisting, and the creative process and its links with symbolisation as new, alive, containing life itself, something that exists for its own sake. The emphasis on “a way of functioning which is essential if something new is to be created” (Milner 1987, p. 214) Milner is not concerned with what is symbolised or the unconscious wishes informing it (ibid, p. 214; p. 211). Rather, the focus is on what is created. The distinctive contribution of the Independents makes the relation of internal and external world not merely a condition of symbolizing an internal development. It emphasises that both living and psychoanalysis spring from the wish to be a participant in one’s own world, whether alone or with others. Michael Parsons (2000), following Winnicott, attributes creativity to the constant interplay of paradoxical ideas in the transitional/potential space, a place where illusion can be maintained. He believes that both psychic reality and symbolism can be used defensively to avoid ordinary reality, but that ‘both are essential for an alive engagement with it’ (M. Parsons 2000, p. 181), the reason being that both are ‘intrinsically dependent’ on the double function of negation. In his acceptance of this paradox in creative symbolism, he is close to Milner who in her classical 1952 paper also does not see symbolism as a defensive regression but as a necessary part of development of a creative relationship to the world.
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