I’m glad to have recently learned about the mid twentieth century psychoanalyst and theorist Marion Milner who specialized in creativity and blockages and I loved this article by Akshi Singh exploring the idea of how creativity “de-idealizes” the self and forces a deep look at ugliness and destruction along with the beauty.

For Milner, both love and work are steeped in risk and danger, presenting terrains where the boundaries of the self are breached, convictions and certainties surrendered, and where destructiveness, aggression, and shame are close at hand. It isn’t Eros versus Thanatos here, love versus evil and destruction. No, for Milner destruction and evil are part of love.