Bothered By Alligators

Book excerpt: 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.