A D R I A N  S T O K E S

Adrian Stokes and the Psychoanalytic
by
Ron Graziani

Klein was convinced that a loving concern for the object existed even in the more regressive response to depressive anxiety; both types of responses become sources of creativity and sublimation. But even within a more mature response, depressive anxiety is never fully overcome. Thus, experience with real objects in the external world continually modifies and transforms the original internal images. The disappearance of the good objects in one's external life continually reawakens the depressive position. The loss of the external object threatens the loss of the internal object associated with it, once again exposing the ego to paranoid and depressive fears.⁵⁰

Although she alluded to the roots of the creative impulse in a 1929 article, it was not until 1935 that Klein presents the clinical results establishing the depressive position as the decisive moment recurring throughout life. Klein's positions implied a reparative nucleus capable of expressing as well as repressing. In 1946 Klein published a full account of the paranoid-schizoid position,⁵¹ establishing the existence of the ego in infantile development at a much earlier period than was believed. Even at this early stage it was the elaborations of the ego in its object-relations that created internal phantasies and put defensive mechanisms into action.

In Venice, An Aspect of Art, Stokes began to apply Klein's findings. Giorgione's paintings became the pivotal source for retranslating Venice—the external fantasies of nature externalized—into the psychoanalytic terms of the psyche. With Giorgione's Tempesta filled with "would-be gods in a godless world,"⁵² Stokes introduced, as a substitution for the religious concept of God, the psychoanalytic notion of an original interior good object: "We harbour the idea of a good object (i.e., God) and since without it we would very soon die, it is a contradiction to conceive this power to be also outside us."⁵³ This new framework would be dominated by love (the Kleinean reparative apparatus) not by fear and the sense of guilt. God became an internal good object, and through substitution, "the constant factor of mental activity,"⁵⁴ the artistic creation becomes the epitome of this process. Man becomes "alive twice over in reality and in image."⁵⁵

The "Envoi" of Venice was also used to lay out the general groundwork for Stokes' subsequent autobiographical trilogy. Mental life became dependent upon the external world, the "laid out instantaneous world of space."⁵⁶ With Inside Out Stokes finally introduced the Kleinean depressive position and delineated the reparative process of his own internal good object.