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“See now they vanish
The faces and places, with the self which, as it could, loved Them. To become renewed, transfigured, in another pattern”
In this chapter I shall explore the development of Kleinian aesthetics through the work of the psychoanalyst Hanna Segal, one of Klein's pupils, and the art critic and historian, Adrian Stokes. Their combined contribution lays the foundation of what can be described as a “traditional” Kleinian aesthetic: an approach to art which, as we shall see, regards the attainment of the depressive position as central to aesthetic and creative experience, binding it to a specific ethical commitment.
As we explored in the previous chapter, during the late 1940s and the 1950s Kleinian concepts were beginning to open up a whole new perspective on the relationship between the developing mind and its relationship to internal and external objects. Freud had always been always interested in the creative achievements of human beings and coined the term “sublimation” to denote the transmuting of basic instinct for biological satisfaction into an