A D R I A N  S T O K E S

Adrian Stokes and the Psychoanalytic
by
Ron Graziani

Where his earlier traditional method tied him directly to the external medium, producing a metaphorical momentum toward inner consciousness, his new found psychoanalytic method forced him to reverse that process; he now began in the inner sanctum and moved outward into materialized aesthetic form. "Stone" with its sure objectness, necessarily overwhelming the modelling attempt, is replaced by libido.

In "Concerning Art and Metapsychology," Stokes, using Freud, insisted that instinctual drives (the libido) are "object seeking," and require an experience of the other in order to manifest themselves. Inner phantasies become even more tied to their externalization; the more intense the phantasy the more complete the object becomes, the more "otherness" it must maintain. In effect, "all knowledge has its origin in external perception," as though the artist were now "able to make of his mind a stone;" and vice versa the more other and complete the work of art was, the more it could "display and manifest the content of his mind"⁶⁴ This "stone" quality no longer inhibits the artist's projections—modeling—but enhances it.

In Smooth and Rough the internal sources of the "exquisite arrangement of space"⁶⁵ are "the incorporated figures that we rock within us...the outside in."⁶⁶ With the introduction in Smooth and Rough of the paranoid-schizoid position. Stokes accepted the object relations emphasis on the quality of mothering. The machine age (modeling) is seen as a split mind using the weapon of "omnipotent control"(effective totalitarianism)⁶⁷ to pillage the mothers body, the environment. "The environment it creates, the problem it poses, the kind of organization it requires have elements that tend to weaken the ego's structure."⁶⁸  The ego regresses to the paranoid-schizoid position. Machine age architecture implies a less defined form of self. Stokes' earlier use of empathy theory is given its repressive origin. It becomes the "omnipotent control" behind Melanie Klein's "projective identification," control of another by putting a part of the self within the other, a part then lost to the self—a culture which lacks a charged emblem. The situation Stokes attempted to explain was not how we suffer in our culture, but how we create it, for man "created it no more from nature than from himself."⁶⁹ With the realization that the machine age "flattens the unstable rudimentary ego," Stokes could begin to understand from outside the "ever so genuine underlife of the ego."⁷⁰