A Brief Introduction to the Happiness-Producing Paradoxes of Marion Milner

There is something very difficult in attempting to secure your own happiness, and I think Marion Milner was on to it. I wish I had more to share about her – my introductory-level research has informed me that she was a British psychoanalyst who lived for all but the last two years of the 20^th century, and that she wrote several books under the pen name Joanna Field. One of these books was A Life Of One’s Own, which Maria Popova recently wrote about on her blog, Brain Pickings. A Life Of One’s Own, according to Popova, is a “field guide to self possession, mindful perception, and the art of knowing what you really want” that began as “a seven year experiment in living, aimed at unpeeling the existential rind of all we mistake for fulfillment” in order to understand the sources of real happiness.

As Popova relates, the heart of Milner’s experiment was her journaling practice, which had dramatic effects on the scope of her self-awareness. At the outset, she had a familiar-sounding drive to self-actualize based on a rigidly defined vision of her identity, wielding a “narrow focus which meant seeing life as if from blinkers and with the center of awareness in my head.” As she practiced the “rigorous watching and fierce discipline” of her journaling, however, she began to notice that her moments of greatest happiness were concomitant with “a wide focus which meant knowing with the whole of my body, a way of looking which quite altered my perception of whatever I saw.”

Here as elsewhere, the most interesting thing about Milner’s work, it seems to me, is how much it approaches paradox: she finds that the only way to be satisfied with life is to give oneself up to it. She writes about being “actively passive,” and eventually realizes that the peace she seeks can only come through a sense of security that, curiously enough, is won through a kind of Kierkegaardian leap, a moment of complete vulnerability:

“I had just begun to ponder over the fact that all the things which I had found to be sources of happiness seemed to depend upon the capacity to relax all straining, to widen my attention beyond the circle of personal interest, and to look detachedly at my own experience. I had just realized that this relaxing and detachment must depend on a fundamental sense of security, and yet that I could apparently never feel safe enough to do it, because there was an urge in me which I had dimly perceived but had never yet been able to face. It was then that the idea occurred to me that until you have, once at least, faced everything you know — the whole universe — with utter giving in, and let all that is “not you” flow over and engulf you, there can be no lasting sense of security.”