A D R I A N  S T O K E S

Adrian Stokes and the Psychoanalytic
by
Ron Graziani

In "Form in Art: A Psychoanalytic Interpretation" (1952) he attempted to outline a theory of attitudes that determine the creation of form in art. The basic problem was how to distinguish the form in art from the form in other kinds of experience. The "genesis of the aesthetic form"⁷¹ lies within the substitutive process of inner phantasies. They become external and physical. "identifying the interchange between an all-embracing and particularized element with good images."⁷² Form is projected phantasies made cohesive. The images—representing the feeling of oneness and the recognition of otherness—become the "universal filter"⁷³ through which content must pass. The reparative effort becomes the "nucleus of aesthetic form;"⁷⁴ both images are essential to it. This nucleus "inhibits or prevents the disturbance in mere ecstasy associated with the blissful merging ego."⁷⁵ Sublimated content is aesthetically dealt with, not symbolization alone. Form in art is "content conceived in terms of medium and a culture that has been profoundly associated by the artist with images [older experiences of ego relationship] or their prime surrogate."⁷⁶  Through the reparative act, images of self-sufficiency and enveloping dependence are reconstituted.

The concept of reparation parallels Stokes' earlier concept of history. To recover a past, one must re-experience it. But lost in time, it cannot be fully recovered; only its introjected image is recovered. This need for history reveals the psyche's need to project a history of its development into its surroundings. Acceptance of the past as "petrified" reflects the weakness of the original internal lost object, and reduces the strength necessary to recover the past. Rituals that attempt to prolong our roots in the past will eventually loose their rationale, but the "ritualistic care" of art remains to encompass us, to "radiate our present with our past...immediate yet old."⁷⁷

In Three Essays on Painting of our Time (1961) Stokes translated the his present cultural condition through its paranoid-schizoid elements. With culture becoming the "climate of feeling" and style determining how the two positions are combined—helping us to identify ourselves through "fixed hard objects"⁷⁸ —architecture, the mother of the arts (the original destroyed object) provided the original language of "expressiveness of space, volume and texture, equivalent to the impact of phantasies."⁷⁹ But architecture was "lacking as a vital source in the 20th century,"⁸⁰ modern painting had to find a substitute for it. The picture plane became the surrogate architectural wall. According to Stokes, unity is no longer possible in modern life. The split character of our culture "inspired an element of regression."⁸¹