A Life of One’s Own: Marion Milner (2017)

I just finished this book recently, prompted by reading this great piece. It was an interesting book. A little slow in places but the author describes her internal thought process exceptionally well. If you meditate at all, this will be fascinating as it describes the process of her inventing meditation all on her own. I have to wonder what her reaction would have been if she read some of the texts written about meditation available at the time.

I first read this about 20 years ago, and can honestly say it is one of the most surprising and fascinating books I've encountered, though you need to be open to questioning the "default picture" of human psychology a little in order to get much out of it, I guess.

The book is full of arresting and innovative insights on awareness and perception. For example, the spotlight analogy for "covert attention" is often attributed to Francis Crick writing in 1984[1], but fifty years earlier Milner writes:

> At any moment there exist in the fringes of my thought faint patternings which can be brought to distinction when I look at them. Like a policeman with a flash-light I can throw the bright circle of my awareness where I choose; if any shadow or movement in the dim outer circle of its rays arouses my suspicion, I can make it come into the circle of brightness and show itself for what it is. But the beam of my attention is not of fixed width, I can widen or narrow it as I choose.[2]

1: e.g. "(The analogy was first suggested by Francis Crick, the geneticist.)" - https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/06/how-cons...

2: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=ntg6OE7haSgC&pg=PA77#v=o...