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'Before I began this experiment I had always been haunted by the feeling that the surface of life, what everyone said about it, was quite different from the reality of life, that the important things that were happening all the time were on the whole quite different from what was said about them.' - Marion Milner
What is it that stops people from knowing what they want? How much of our experience is shaped by images, symbols, and early memories - and do such things help or hinder one becoming an adult? Written in 1936, An Experiment in Leisure continues Marion Milner's unique and compelling investigation into how we lead our lives, complementing the account she began in A Life of One's Own.
Attempting to understand the gap between what she memorably describes as 'the poverty of words and the reality of living', she draws on memory images - in books, mythology, religious experience, travel, and even going to the theatre - that seem to point to a suspension of ordinary, everyday awareness. From this state of emptiness springs an increasing imaginative appreciation of being alive and, as Milner concludes, of being a woman.
With a new Foreword by Akshi Singh, An Experiment in Leisure remains a striking and captivating adventure in thinking and living with uncertainty, whose insights remain fresh and relevant today.
List of contents
Foreword to the Routledge Classics Edition Akshi Singh Introduction 1. Memories of Hobbies 2. Memories of Travel 3. Interest in Witchcraft 4. Images of Pagan Ceremonial 5. Looking for Pictures of What One Submits to 6. Fairy Tale: 'The Death's Head Emperor' 7. How Should the Story End? 8. Finding Further Terms 9. Haunting Images from a Bull-Fight 10. Feeling Drives Me to Study 'Peer Gynt' 11. Which Kind of Imagination Is Religion Concerned With? 12. Acceptance of Uncertainty as a Condition of New Understanding 13. An Attempt to Review the Method Used in This Experiment 14. More Images of Death 15. Attempt to Review the Results of This Experiment 16. Comparison with Other People 17. How Does Being a Woman Affect the Problem? 18. Summing Up Index
About the author
Marion Milner (1900–1998) was a distinguished British psychoanalyst, educationalist, autobiographer, and artist.
Summary
With a new foreword by Akshi Singh, An Experiment in Leisure remains a striking and captivating adventure in thinking and living with uncertainty, whose insights remain fresh and relevant today.
