A D R I A N  S T O K E S

Adrian Stokes and the Psychoanalytic
by
Ron Graziani

But Stokes translated the artist's "high reality sense" in a radically different way. For Freud, how the artist achieved this effect was his "innermost secret," a "mysterious ability." For Stokes this "uncharted swamp of the mind" (the artist's innermost secret) is translated through the medium's emblematic—"turning outward into definite form an inner ferment."⁴⁵ This becomes the "magic stuff of Form, which coagulates expression."⁴⁶ Freud's conception of the preconscious ("inside") of the artist is mirrored in Stokes' conception of the emblematic between the outside and inside of the medium. What was in the stone was brought to the surface, the "symbol of realized expression, aspects of stone revealing the emblematic spirit of the Quattro Cento externalized."⁴⁷ Stokes made a great effort to expose the emblematic potential of stone in a wonderful biography of limestone.

Stokes' growing preference for the psychoanalytic also surfaces in his 1933 reviews for Spectator. His basic theoretical strategies in "Art Today" were not unrelated to those of Herbert Read, one of the first practicing art critics who tied the psychoanalytic to aesthetic criticism. Stokes' subsequent Spectator reviews dealt with artists Read himself had championed. Read stressed the need for a new understanding of what is involved in aesthetic experience in his article "Psychoanalysis and Criticism" (1925). However, despite his conception of "presentational immediacy" and its therapeutic potential, which closely paralleled Stokes' own aesthetics, Read's work within the psychoanalytic framework was very different.

In "Psychoanalysis and the Problem of Aesthetic Value" (1951) Read continued to defend the artist's "mysterious ability." He also linked the Freudian to the Gestalt theories of art. A dialectical synthesis of these opposites developed, but within the Freudian repressive framework, where art became the scene of restitutions, but also of the enactment of repressed destructive impulses. This dialectic was based on the familiar idea that the ego was in constant "competition" with instinctual drives. The interplay between ego and instinct apparent in the "skill of configuration" (the good Gestalt) in the artwork, enabled Read to attribute "a scale of value" without "regard for its possible rational significance."⁴⁸ For Freud as well as Read form-elaboration or "symbolic transformation" had a biological purpose. It was evidence of the triumph of life over death.

For Stokes, the co-ordinating act of the medium imparts "a form to formless phantasy"; this icon of co-ordination"⁴⁹ posits the emblematic in the medium, and through water and light—the medium's two primary sources of otherness—the Stone blossoms. A psychoanalytic sense of unconsciousness is constantly operational in the medium of art. But it was not until the 1940s that Stokes truly attempted to align the aesthetic and psychoanalytic process. Then the shape the alignment took was Kleinean rather than Freudian.