This edition is an introductory selection from the writings of Adrian Stokes (1902-1972), the Kleinian aesthete who created a unique vision of the relation between psychoanalysis, art, and aesthetic experience in general. His approach was founded initially on his travels in Italy which then acquired a more formal theoretical foundation during his analysis with Melanie Klein. Stokes was a close friend of leading figures in both psychoanalytic and artistic-literary circles, including Richard Wollheim who organised a previous edition of extracts, The Image in Form. The present edition concentrates specifically on the writing that demonstrates the parallels between art and psychoanalysis.



Meg Harris Williams, a writer and artist, studied English at the Universities of Cambridge and Oxford and art at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence, and has had a lifelong psychoanalytic education, working closely with Donald Meltzer. She has written and lectured extensively in the UK and abroad on psychoanalysis and literature. She is a visiting lecturer for AGIP and at the Tavistock Centre in London, and an Honorary Member of the Psychoanalytic Center of California. She is married with four children and lives in Farnham, Surrey.



Introduction



Meg Harris Williams



1. The quest for sanity



The arts of life



The power to communicate



Relating to the object (with Donald Meltzer)



Inner truth and outer space



The image of sanity



Form and wholeness



Contemplative states



2. Art and the inner world



Painting and the inner world



Absorption and attention



All art is of the body



Weighty articulation and hazy presences



The art of appreciation



The artist and the art appreciator (with Donald Meltzer)



3. Modes of art and modes of being



Carving and modelling



Michelangelo's sonnet



Pregnant shapes



Identity in difference



The evening light



Oneness and otherness



Classic synthesis



The line of equivalence



The invitation in art



4. Mother art



Integrity of the outward object



Concreted time



Myth, stone, and water



The flux of feelings objectified



Accumulated sea-change



The feel of our structure



5. Close looking



Piero's perspective: art and science



Giorgione: catastrophic change



Turner: beneficence in space



6. Construction of the good mother 



Inside Out: an autobiographical narrative



Envoi



Appendix 1 by Donald Meltzer



Appendix 2 by Eric Rhode



References and bibliography



Index