ABSTRACT
Milner's final text, Bothered by Alligators, came about when, in her nineties, she unexpectedly came across a diary she had kept during the early years of her son's life, recording his conversations and play between the ages of two and nine. With it was a storybook written and illustrated by him when he was about seven years old.
Whilst working on the material, Milner gradually realised that both diary and storybook were provoking questions she realised had scarcely been asked, let alone answered in her own analysis. Through her memories, her notebooks and by interpreting her own previously discarded drawings and paintings, she reaches a point of awareness that they were depicting things she did not know in herself, addressing her relationships not only with her son but also with her husband, her father, and in particular, her mother.
Like many of Milner's earlier books there is a deeply personal quality to Bothered by Alligators, but it is a quality that transcends the personal and reveals insights and conclusions that will be both interesting and useful to clinicians; and fascinating to readers from a psychological, a literary, an artistic or an educational background, and, in particular, those with an interest in psychoanalysis and autobiography and in Milner's work.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
chapter |9 pages
Introduction
part |1 pages
PART ONE The diary
chapter 1|57 pages
The diary
part |1 pages
PART TWO The story book
chapter 2|47 pages
The story book
part |1 pages
PART THREE Thinking about the story book
chapter 3|20 pages
My fi rst thoughts about the story book
part |1 pages
PART FOUR Towards a change of aim
chapter 4|15 pages
Crosses, trees and no arms or feet
chapter 5|10 pages
Water, tears and a use of gravity
part |1 pages
PART FIVE Using my own pictures
chapter 6|9 pages
Always protecting your mother
chapter 7|7 pages
Two new free drawings
chapter 8|10 pages
Play of making collages from my old failed paintings
part |1 pages
PART SIX Different kinds of order
chapter 9|5 pages
Words made fl esh
chapter 10|5 pages
The incantation and “The Hidden Order of Art”
part |1 pages
PART SEVEN The family setting
chapter 11|5 pages
My father, his breakdown and recovery
chapter 12|7 pages
My mother and us three children
chapter 13|6 pages
Me being physically ill and the Undine story
part |1 pages
PART EIGHT D.W. Winnicott and me
chapter 14|6 pages
Being in analysis with D.W. Winnicott
chapter 15|3 pages
A Winnicott paper on disillusion about what one gives
chapter 16|3 pages
D.W.W.’s doodle drawings
part |1 pages
PART NINE Towards wholeness