A D R I A N  S T O K E S

Adrian Stokes and the Psychoanalytic
by
Ron Graziani

When Stokes began his analysis in 1930 with Melanie Klein, she had recently become established in the English psychoanalytic community. By the 1930s she was of major importance in clinical child development. Stokes relied on her two "positions" to reformulate his analysis of the art object and one's relation to it.

The paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions describe how the infant handles its object relations. The paranoid-schizoid position refers to the earliest phase, when the primitive ego's relationships with objects are still fuzzy. It is not yet capable of differentiating objects as separate entities (for example, the breast as part of the whole person).

Structured around its innate life and death instincts, the primitive ego, being weak, tends to fragment or split relations into good ideal part-object and persecuting bad part-object. In this position, the ego's main aim is to inhibit the persecutor's destructive potential (paranoid anxiety) by introjecting the ideal good object, and projecting the persecuting bad object (partly associated with the death instinct). This type of primitive organization in effect splits the ego; projective identification articulates this splitting of the ego.

Gradually objects once split begin to be seen as self-sufficient whole objects (for example, the mother); this whole "mother" is then introjected, becoming the core of the ego. Although now no longer split into part objects, the whole object is a source of both gratification and frustration. It is at this stage that a fundamental change of "position" occurs.

Under the influence of uncontrollable impulses during periods of frustration and anxiety, this whole object (both in its external and internal form) is continually attacked, in effect destroying the infant's inner core. The"original" loved object is lost. Several options are available within this position if the self accepts and realizes itself to be the cause and destruction of the original object. But this creates depressive anxiety, resulting in a new set of feelings and mechanisms, felt to be irretrievably destroyed or lost, feelings of persecution overpower the ego. It responds by regressing to violent defense mechanisms or to a partial paranoid-schizoid position, involving splitting, idealization, denial etc. On the other hand, if the remaining internal objects are adequate enough, memory of the good original objects create a desire to repair/restore the lost object, the object coherently "other". Through repeated experience of  loss and restoration, a more fully integrated mature ego develops a more—developed picture of the inner self and external world.