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In Art and Analysis visual artist and literary critic, Meg Harris Williams, seeks to convey several achievements of the art critic, Adrian Stokes . They include his pioneering use of psychoanalysis as means of understanding aesthetic experience; and his paralleling of his own ‘acutely observed immersion’ in art and landscape with the immersion of psychotherapists in their material in translating it into ‘verbal art-form’ (p. xxii).
Stokes's use of psychoanalysis as means of understanding aesthetic experience included his drawing on ideas gleaned from Melanie Klein with whom he was in psychoanalytic treatment from 1930 to 1935, for a few months in 1938, and again in 1946. These ideas included her theory about infantile fantasies of attacking part-objects of the mother's body (her breasts, for instance); fear of the mother's persecuting retaliation; depressive concern about the damage done by attacking her; and the reassurance of her surviving, repaired, restored, and whole, thereby serving as an integrating figure in the ego.
This theory is evident in Williams's selection from Stokes's book, Reflections on the Nude, from which she quotes him saying:
Rembrandt, it seems to me, painted the female nude as the sagging repository of jewels and dirt, of fabulous babies and magical faeces despoiled yet later repaired and restored, a body often flaccid and creased yet still the desirable source of a scarred bounty: not the bounty of the perfected, stable breast housed in the temple of the integrated psyche that we possess in the rounded forms of classical
Page 275art, but riches and drabness joined by the infant's interfering envy, sometimes with the character of an oppressive weight or listlessness left by his thefts. There supervenes, nonetheless, a noble acceptance of ambivalence in which love shines. (pp. 35-6)
With such examples Stokes admirably used Klein's version of psychoanalysis to illuminate aesthetic experience.
This was perhaps more questionably the case with his commentar