S.R.L

“For a long time I was continually putting off the next step in my exploration because I felt I ought to know more, knew there were many books written about these things, felt that I must read them all before I could go any further. Whenever I gave in to this impulse I found it disastrous. It took me years to learn that I must never begin my search by looking in books, never say, ‘I know too little, I must read some more before I start’, but that I must always observe first, express what I observed, and then, if I needed it, see what the books had to say.”
― Marion Milner, A Life of One's Own

“If emotion and fatigue lowered the potency of thought, what raised it? I began to reconsider my moments of delight in terms of this statement of the problem, moments whose essential quality had been a fusing of experience, a flash of significance uniting the meaningless and separate. If one assumed that thinking was a process involving some form of energy, it seemed quite appropriate to imagine my gesture of holding back from mental action as causing an accumulation of energy which automatically raised the potency. By preventing energy from continually flowing away in a noisy stream of efforts and purposes I could make it fill up into a silent pool of clearness.”
― Marion Milner, A Life of One's Own

“I had just begun to ponder over the fact that all the things which I had found to be sources of happiness seemed to depend upon the capacity to relax all straining, to widen my attention beyond the circle of personal interest, and to look detachedly at my own experience. I had just realized that this relaxing and detachment must depend on a fundamental sense of security, and yet that I could apparently never feel safe enough to do it, because there was an urge in me which I had dimly perceived but had never yet been able to face. It was then that the idea occurred to me that until you have, once at least, faced everything you know — the whole universe — with utter giving in, and let all that is “not you” flow over and engulf you, there can be no lasting sense of security.”
― Marion Milner, A Life of One's Own

“For the analyst it is a source of never-ending astonishment how comparatively well a person can function with the core of himself not participating.”
― Karen Horney, Neurosis and Human Growth: The Struggle Towards Self-Realization