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Adrian Stokes: A Game That Must Be Lost: The Collected Papers of Adrian Stokes.
Cheshire, England: Carcanet Press, 1973.
THE RIVAL FACTION IN OUR own tradition shows us how we look to outsiders. Adrian Stokes wrote The Game That Must be Lost in the Kleinian tradition. His North American readers will likely weary of the few Kleinian first-principles. Splitting, projective identification, good object, bad object, part object, whole object, persecutory anxiety, depressive anxiety, and envy. Is there anything else? How tiresome to see the rich expression of human life reduced to this monotonous, improverished alphabet. There, alas, the American analyst captures the feeling of literary men, of historians, of theologians as they look on the psychoanalytic tradition generally. Do we fancy Melanie Klein an ancient cosmologist reincarnate, unaccountably stranded in a convention of modern scientists? Are these paranoid and depressive positions the Yin and the Yang by which the universe is governed? Are these good objects and bad objects, whole objects and part objects, the earth, air, fire and water, of which everything is composed and by which everything is explained? But that is exactly how the unenlightened see the whole of psychoanalysis, with its libido cathecting this and that, its stock rehearsals of oral, anal, phallic and genital cycles, its castration complexes and penis envy, its predictable translations that numb the mind.
I do not mean to say that our theoretical differences are just projections of our own embarassments onto others. It makes a difference which school one belongs to. Reading Stokes we become aware again of how much more concerned with "structure" American analysts have been. An American would caricature the Kleinian picture of growth and development as a constant reshuffling