On his return from Italy in 1929, the art writer Adrian Stokes went into psychoanalysis with Melanie Klein, to confront a depression ‘intent on frustrating and destroying him’. This paper looks at the strange, hybrid text that psychoanalysis gave rise to: an account of Hyde Park as the place where meaning itself was being generated, and destroyed. In particular, it looks at Stokes's preoccupation with waste and remainders, and the failed attempts of industrial capitalism's ‘mechanical restitutions’, to put them to rights. In giving an account of his own destructive thought process during these years, I propose that Stokes gives a vivid account of his socio-political moment, but also works through a particular debate that was emerging for the British Psychoanalytic Society during these years: a debate about whether the death drive or the ‘negative’ could be meaningful for psychoanalytic theory.