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Painting and the Inner World is a collection of three essays. The first carries the title given to the book as a whole; the second consists of a dialogue between Stokes and a psychoanalyst, Meltzer; in the third essay, Stokes, once more alone, discusses the art of Turner. The purposes of the book is to uncover the psychological roots of that creative impulse in man which leads him to paint and to look at pictures.
Stokes operates with the concepts of Melanie Klein and, although he is analysing the creative impulse, he is preoccupied by what one might describe as the “katabolic” functions, such as excretion, aggression, and destructiveness. He approaches these functions with a univalent system of values which appears to carry the imprint of the English Protestant culture pattern, and he seems to find it difficult to think of faeces and urine as anything else but poisonous, scalding, and destructive. Undoubtedly these qualities form part of the total symbolic meaning that the unconscious gives to these substances, but there is good reason to think that, in the unconscious, they are experienced not only