Adrian Stokes’ Kleinian Aesthetics?

I am writing to draw the attention of readers of Psychoanalysis and History to Richard Read's (2002) book about Adrian Stokes. True it says little about psychoanalysis. Nevertheless it is arguably highly relevant to psychoanalysis not least, paradoxically, because it puts in question the notion of Stokes as pioneer of Kleinian aesthetics.

Melanie Klein described art as reparatively facing inner depression and loss. So do many of her followers, notably Hanna Segal. Stokes wrote in similar vein. But he also wrote of healing — or ‘salvation’, according to Read — through meditative contemplation of the outwardness of art restoring us from inner turmoil. Read details the source of this theory in Stokes’ ambivalent engagement with the work of Ruskin, Pater, Bradley and Pound. He also notes more or less explicit parallels between Stokes’ philosophy of rejecting inner repression in favour of extravert action (in the case of Nietzsche) and in favour of attention to outer reality (in the case of Freud). Again and again Stokes celebrated outwardness in art, particularly in early Renaissance painting, architecture and sculpture. In 1932, for instance, he wrote of a male figure, carved by Donatello, symbolizing ‘the ideal of emotional externalization … identified with the Quattro Cento … the translation outwards of the formless flux of passions to definite, concentrated, objective form’ (in Read 2002, p. 203).

What did Klein make of such claims in treating Stokes (from 1929 to 1936, and again in 1938 and in )? Read quotes from her account of Stokes’ analysis in which, of course, she concealed his identity. From these quotations it seems that Klein interpreted Stokes’ emphasis on externalization in terms of her then theory of the boy defending against feared inner attack by his mother (in retaliation for his attack on her) by reassuring himself that his penis is intact. Perhaps this contributed to Klein's later account of flight from inner to outer reality as pathological manic def