'Vomit it out of me'

Marion Milner at the zoo

Though I’ve rarely thought about the relationship between the guts and the mind, I was reading An Experiment in Leisure by psychoanalyst Marion Milner (published in 1937 under the pseudonym Joanna Field before she trained as an analyst) and noticed that she sometimes made reference to digestive processes:

If you have once turned inwards and become aware of anything more complicated than the comforts and discomforts of digestion and appetite and sensory pleasures, then you are at the mercy of terrors that seem far to outmatch the dangers of the external world, you are at the mercy of past and future. 

Here digestion, along with somatic and sensory experience more broadly, is framed as somehow more superficial than psychic experience.

However, just a few pages later she goes on one of many visits to London Zoo where she sees some huge centipedes in a jar. She involuntarily imagines swallowing the centipedes and feels physically sick. Strange associations follow:

Then quite absurdly, I found myself thinking of the digestive processes of owls, how in the country I had often found their casts, little bundles of claws and fur and bones. I remembered how the owl swallows his dinner whole, spewing up the indigestible bits that might otherwise tear his guts out, spewing them up at leisure in neat little bundles. Then I remembered too, how I had for days been blindly fighting the thought of someone who had criticized me, cruelly as I felt it, a cold-hearted tearing criticism that seemed to destroy my whole way of life – a poisonous centipede. And I had blindly tried to escape from it, forget it, vomit it out of me undigested.

I was struck by these two very different invocations of digestive processes.

In the first passage, digestion is framed as merely bodily, distinct from and less complicated/profound than internal psychic processes, while the second passage indicates that the guts and the mind are interconnected.

The sights of the centipede at the zoo makes Milner feel physically sick. Her reaction is not just an immediate visual one but also recalls the digestive process of owls, which in turn leads her to reflect on an unpleasant critical encounter with another person. The experience is visceral and provokes a bodily response but it is simultaneously associative. Her nausea is provoked not by the centipede directly but by the associations she makes in response to it. The fact that her physical response to the literal centipede links to an interpersonal experience in the past does not mean that the physical symptom produced is only metaphorical. Psychic symbolism is more than mere analogy; the psychic and the somatic are intertwined.

Milner feels sick in response to the centipede but only, she suggests, because it connected to her previous experience of being criticised. This completely contradicts her earlier statement that being at the mercy of the past and future involves attending to something ‘more complicated than the comforts and discomforts of digestion and appetite’. These ‘comforts and discomforts’ are – her weird little moment at the zoo suggests – complicated in their own right and they are entwined with psychic life.

The encounter with the centipede shows how complicated relations between the inside and the outside can be. Sensual experiences in the present can connect to emotional memories of the past. The ‘dangers of the external world’ are not, then, completely distinct from the kinds of dangers that emerge solely from turning inwards because the outside is taken in – metabolised, vomited up, shat out, regurgitated.

This is a fragment about digestion and the mind taken from a response I wrote to a panel of papers at the symposium ‘Modernity and the Gut’ at Kelvinhall, University of Glasgow in April 2023 organised by Manon Mathias and Elsa Richardson.