Marion Milner’s “pliable medium” and the role of the patient’s creativity in the analytic encounter

This article explores British psychoanalyst Marion Milner's (1900–1998) understanding of how creative play and drawing for her child and adult patients is integral to transformation in the analytic encounter. Milner explicitly proposes the act of picture-making as providing a reparative experience of an attuned, reciprocal relationship with another. Her term the ‘pliable medium’ first coined in her book On Not Being Able to Paint (1950) is explored as a concept reflective of Milner's enduring commitment to art-making as an explicitly therapeutic activity. In this way, we come to see how Milner's clinical technique depends as much on facilitating the patient's creativity in the analytic situation as it does in considering what the patient-analyst relationship can do for the patient's psychic growth.