Milner | Nina Marion | née Blackett

Identity area

Type of entity

Person

Authorized form of name

Milner | Nina Marion | née Blackett

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    Standardized form(s) of name according to other rules

      Other form(s) of name

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        Description area

        Dates of existence

        1900-02-01--1998-05-29

        History

        Nina Marion Blackett was born in London on 1 February 1900. Her father Arthur Stuart Blackett worked on the London stock exchange and her mother Caroline Maynard was an enthusiastic artist. Her brother was Nobel physicist Patrick Blackett.

        She studied psychology and physiology at University College London and graduated in 1924 with a first class degree. After graduation she started work as an industrial psychologist. In 1927 she was invited by Prof. Elton Mayo to study with him in the US and observe the development of his Hawthorne experiment. After 2 years she returned to England and was occupied in industrial psychology until the birth of her son in 1932. From then until 1939 she worked for the Girls Public Day School Trust as a psychologist, researching the emotional problems that could influence girls at school. This led to her book ‘The Human Problem in Schools’ (1938).

        At the age of 26, Milner had begun to record her thought streams in a diary in an attempt to discover a ‘central purpose in life’. In 1934, under the pseudonym Joanna Field, Milner published ‘A Life of One's Own’ (1934). This was the first of three books in which she shares the method and discoveries of her diary keeping. The discovery of her unconscious mind through this study was an immense surprise to Milner and it led her eventually to train as a psychoanalyst. In 1943, following analysis with Sylvia Payne, she qualified as an analyst in the British Society.

        Also in 1943 she began an analysis of a psychotic patient which would last more than 20 years. Milner produced a uniquely detailed account of this analysis in her book ‘The Hands of the Living God’ (1969). She was also a talented artist and her book ‘On Not Being Able to Paint’ (1950) is an important work on creativity.

        She wrote and published many other books and papers during her long career as a psychoanalyst and continued to see patients until her early 90s. She died on 29 May 1998.

        Places

        Legal status

        Functions, occupations and activities

        Psychoanalyst

        Mandates/sources of authority

        Internal structures/genealogy

        General context

        Relationships area

        Access points area

        Subject access points

        Place access points

        Occupations

        Control area

        Authority record identifier

        GB BPASA AR Milner NM

        Maintained by

        British Psychoanalytical Society Archive

        Institution identifier

        British Psychoanalytical Society Archive (ISDIAH, 2008)

        Rules and/or conventions used

        ISO 8601-1:2019, Date and time - Representations for information interchange.
        National Council on Archives - Rules for the Construction of Personal, Place and Corporate Names, 1997.
        International Council on Archives - International Standard for Describing Institutions with Archival Holdings (ISDIAH), 2008.

        Status

        Revised

        Level of detail

        Partial

        Dates of creation, revision and deletion

        Revised 2024-04-04

        Language(s)

        • English

        Script(s)

        • Latin

        Sources

        Maintenance notes

        Revised by Ewan O'Neill