A D R I A N  S T O K E S

Adrian Stokes and the Psychoanalytic
by
Ron Graziani

Stokes phantasized Italy as the restored good object, a reassembled, repaired image of his original one of a London split into bad Hyde Park and euphoric Kensington Gardens. The Italy of the Quattro Cento had played the same role for the arts in Stokes' first trilogy. Inside Out is Stokes' subjectivity in pursuit of its own criticality. The potential for rebirth for both Stokes and the arts was Italy. Cézanne is used to conclude the book by becoming the aesthetic surrogate in modern art. His depressive position expressed the interdependence of the "inner flow of the mind and its outer setting."⁵⁷

In "Concerning Art and Metapsychology," Stokes attempted to give a psychoanalytic rationale for the creative/reparative process by supplementing the Freudian schema with post-Kleinean ideas of object relations. The essence of artistic creation becomes "bestowing on pieces of matter the power to communicate a particular set of phantasies...through the medium of the external world, in terms of the external world."⁵⁸ The power of the internal phantasy projected on the material is still found entirely in the "poignancy of its articulation."⁵⁹

In the "Envoi" of Venice, Stokes asserted that "fantasy cannot be undermined if utter devotion is also paid to truth;...aesthetic truth would be defined by contrast to the truth of science."⁶⁰ In Art and Science (1949) Stokes attempted to concretize his earliest dichotomy of prose and poetry developed in Sunrise in the West. Piero della Francesca's "sense of colour" epitomizes this process, ultimately leading to the quality of Piero's love, associated with sanity.

Stokes closed his autobiographical trilogy with Smooth and Rough (1951). Melanie Klein is finally mentioned "officially" and a complete commitment is made to psychoanalysis as the "ultimate basis for the attitudes of Humanism."⁶¹ Stokes translated love, loss, and rebirth psychoanalytically. Rebirth now was not death and spiritual release, but growth through the depressive position. The concept of separation enabled Stokes to intensify the meaning of the phrase, "architecture the mother of the arts." The stone blossom celebration of Quattrocento buildings is now translated in Smooth and Rough as the "celebration of the first triumphant return of the lost object"⁶² The reconstruction of this "ego defining object"⁶³ occurred with special intensity in architecture.

But the Kleinean psychoanalytic approach to art allowed Stokes to accomplish much more than rephrasing what he had stated in Stones of Rimini. The modeling/carving schema did not allow Stokes to discuss modeling without muddling carving. Yet both elements were present in every work, and Stokes wanted to express them dialectically, but was inhibited by dualism. The corresponding Kleinean positions gave him dialectical method at last.