"Anything of Note": Recovering "Lost Life" in the Psychoanalytic Archive

Abstract:

This essay engages with the hitherto embargoed letters, drawings and case notes of Stella Coomber ("Susan"), the subject of Marion Milner's case history The Hands of the Living God. Using these documents as a starting point, I decode the identities of medical staff, institutions, and contacts whose names are disguised in Milner's book, and reconstruct some of Stella's life behind the scenes of, and after, Hands. The letters disclose her project of writing an autobiographical companion volume to Milner's, a project which was never realized. In later letters Stella is increasingly despondent about her failure to write this book, feeling that her life has been wasted, for she has not produced "anything of note." The essay suggests that there is a way of reading her "notes" as themselves both autobiography and counter case-history. I approach Stella's correspondence as a piece of life writing: not a traditional narrative, but one whose fragmentary form gives expression to her complex and exemplary experience.