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Psychoanalysis sees art as an activity intended to allay ungratified wishes in the artist himself and subsequently in his audience. The artist's aim is to set himself free and offer freedom to others who suffer from similar arrested desires. He represents his personal wishful fantasies as fulfilled; but to make them a work of art, he must transform and soften what is offensive in them, conceal their personal origin, and by their beauty bribe other people with a bonus of pleasure.
In this small but stimulating book Stokes has pointed out the potent and latent sources which are hidden in instinctual liberation. He deals with the impressions of the artist's childhood in his life history and how his work is a reaction to those impressions. Stokes sees the problems of artistic creation and appreciation in the light of psychoanalytic knowledge. Art is an acceptable reality in which the artist by his artistic illusion, symbols, and substitutes is able to provoke real emotions. In this wish-fulfilling world, Stokes sees art as a region halfway between reality which frustrates wishes, and the wish-fulfilling world of imagination—a region where men's strivings for omnipotence are still in full force.
In his title essay he describes how the human infant's first relationships with the mother are with part-objects, such as the breast, which he comes to assume as part of himself. This symbiotic relationship persists until in his later evolution the establishment of whole objects occurs through independence and separation from the mother, thus gaining a realization of the outside world of objects.
Through the nude, Stokes provides us with an imaginative translation of the regressive whole-object-prototype (the mother) and permits us to retain our respect for the naked body and thus for other human beings. Through art, society is provided with whole objects for contemplation. The world of objects becomes the setting for our projective, introjective, and splitting processes.
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