Much has been written about the influence of the human body on architectural scale. Much less has been written about the effect of architecture in giving form to the ego. An exception is the London-born writer, Adrian Stokes (1902–72). In explaining his achievement in this respect, I begin with Freudian accounts of the ego before turning to Stokes's rejection of massive and phallic scale in favour of architecture containing and unifying related forms to create an integrated image of the ego. I then end with the ramifications of this in Stokes's account of modern art, which in turn arguably influenced a revolution in psychoanalysis that continues today.
Freud had difficulty accounting for the ego. A ‘unity comparable to the ego cannot exist in the individual from the start; the ego has to be developed’, he argued. ‘The autoerotic instincts, however, are there from the very first; so there must be something added to auto-eroticism – a new psychical action – in order to bring about narcissism’ (Freud 1914: 77).
What is added? How do the auto-erotic, part-object, oral, anal and genital instincts become integrated into the ego? Freud (1917) found a partial answer to this in theorising melancholia as the effect of melancholics identifying with those they love, hate and have lost as loved and hated figures in the ego. ‘It may be that this identification is the sole condition under which the id can give up its objects’, he speculated. ‘If this is the case then’, he reasoned, the ego might begin in identification with ‘abandoned object-cathexes’ (Freud 1923: 29).
Freud's follower, Melanie Klein, in turn, understood her child patients’ drawings as indicating that the ego is initially constituted by part-object representations of the mother with the father inside her. As evidence, she cited drawings by a nine-year-old patient, Werner, in which he depicted a motor-cycle with ‘an enormous motor, clearly drawn as a penis’ on which sat ‘a woman who sets the motor-cycle in motion’. He then drew ‘a giant with huge eyes and a head containing aerials and wireless sets’ to which he added a drawing of a giant climbing up the Eiffel Tower connected with a skyscraper. Klein interpreted these drawings as signifying Werner's expression of ‘admiration for his father’ through ‘admiration for his mother’ (Klein 1925: 119, 120).
She recounted in similar terms map-drawings by a ten-year-old patient, Richard. She interpreted them as depicting Richard's mother's body as attacked and pierced by the penis of his ‘father, brother and himself’ (Klein 1945: 376). ‘[T]hrough [Klein] we have the cartography, drawn by the children's own hands, of the mother's internal empire’, approved the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, ‘the historical atlas of the intestinal divisions in which the imagos of the father and brothers (real or virtual), in which the voracious aggression of the subject himself, dispute their deleterious dominance over her sacral regions’. These drawings demonstrate the ‘fragmenting effect’ on the ego of the child's first identification with its mother, he claimed (Lacan 1948: 20–1).
How, though, does development proceed from fragmentation to integration? Influenced by his psychoanalytic work with a patient who alienated aspects of herself in paranoid identification with an actress whom she attacked, Lacan (1949) argued that the image of the ego as a whole originates in the infant alienating itself in identification with its reflected mirror image. Out of the infant's initial identification with the mother as a ‘body in bits and pieces’ emerges the ego through identification with ‘the stability of the standing posture, the prestige of stature, the impressiveness of statues’, he argued (Lacan 1953: 15). Reiterating the point, he insisted that the ego develops through identification, from infancy onwards, with whatever seems to signify the phallus, as this is ‘the most tangible element in the real of sexual copulation’ (Lacan 1958: 287). This entails that, contrary to accounts by Freud and Klein of the ego as a self-generating effect of the psyche or libido, our self-knowledge comes from what we see and find in the world around us.
From an early age, Stokes was very much aware of the impact on his self-knowledge (or ego) of massive scale in the world around him. As a schoolboy, he memorised lines from Conrad's novel Heart of Darkness:
Trees, trees, millions of trees, massive, immense, running up high; and at their foot, hugging the bank against the stream, crept the little begrimed steamboat, like a sluggish beetle crawling on the floor of a lofty portico. It made you feel very small.
(Conrad 1899: 41)
A lofty portico fronted Stokes's childhood home, 18 Radnor Place, London. It was similar in scale and character to ‘classical houses of brick with stucco ground floors’ in nearby Sussex Gardens, providing ‘a larger gentleman's version of the simpler buildings of Star Street’, also close to Radnor Place (Kite 2009a: 16).
‘As for the Edwardian buildings in my childhood, I can truly say I experienced from them the shamelessness of pretence’, Stokes recalled towards the end of his life (Stokes 1972: 147). ‘Lingering yesterday in all the part / Where I was born today / I saw twin porticoes as upright pain’, he wrote. ‘[M]ade the neighbourhood so large / It seemed no room could hold this charge / Of hope and dynamite to undermine / A terminal of staid smooth shafts / Enclave with no shouldered home’ (Stokes 1981: 36).
He deplored the large and massive scale of buildings in Oxford, where he studied philosophy after the First World War. ‘Oxford is so massive, / So dismally imposing. / The giant grey blocks of clerical stone / Frown down and breathe tradition’, he recalled. ‘St. Mary's spire is massive, immense, / So dismally imposing, / Short, stumpy, lacking sympathy’ (Stokes 1929a: 173). This was published while he was suffering a nervous breakdown, for which he began psychoanalytic treatment with Melanie Klein.
Soon she recounted his case as that of an anonymous patient, Mr B. She interpreted his breakdown as due to ‘his unconscious idea that the woman was so full of the father's penises and dangerous excrements equated to the penis, that they had burst her open’ (Klein 1932: 265). Stokes in turn adopted this interpretation in recounting his childhood memories of massive buildings and monuments near his childhood home. He recalled his loathing of ‘the giant Achilles statue at Hyde Park Corner’ and ‘the Watts equestrian statue in the middle of the Long Walk’ as ‘stern yet impotent … figures of a father … who both attacked and had been attacked’. He also recalled the Albert Memorial. ‘Here was a great fuss about solid matter; here was a thing of arrest which, unlike the prohibiting railings, protested as well as forbade’, he wrote (Stokes 1947: 148).
‘The best epitome of massive, meticulous incoherence provided by the park, was the Magazine at the end of the Serpentine Bridge. Explosive powder stood stored in this building of grey brick’, he added. ‘Potential murder and death were guarded with careful pageantry.’ Together with other buildings and monuments in and near Hyde Park, he remembered this arsenal as signifying paternal and part-object phallic attack on the park as ‘a destroyed and contaminated mother’ (Stokes 1947: 149,158). He deplored their impact on his ego. ‘What I saw outside confirmed with hideous amplification the self-distrust, the shame and the division that lay inside beneath the threshold’, he recalled (Stokes 1951: 228).
To this he added, some years later, disapproval of the scale of the gasometer near London's Oval cricket ground. ‘[T]his squat, erectile cylinder could be destructive [in evoking] images of the child's impotence in conjunction with monstrous phallic attacks on the mother by a monster father’, he claimed. ‘A bad mother as well, possessing a bad phallus, it does not attempt to pierce and mingle with the vaporous sky but takes on bullying duties’, he added, ‘namely to outrage the houses of the poor (with small apertures) that miserably cluster near the naked plant’. He psychoanalysed these and other examples of massive architectural scale as part-object, phallic, and ‘manic’ counter to weakness, against which he urged architects to be ‘convinced’ of the whole-object ‘integrative purpose of art’ (Stokes 1965: 280, 282, 283).
‘In contrast to his native town, which he thought of as a dark, lifeless and ruined place’, Klein had written of Stokes as Mr B, ‘he pictured an imaginary city full of life, light and beauty, and sometimes found his vision realized, though only for a short time, in the cities he visited in other countries’. She attributed his image of his native London as ‘dark, lifeless and ruined’ to dark fantasies of his father's penis wreaking mayhem in his mother's body, and to fantasies stemming from the ferment of his divided identification and desire for men like his older brothers, one of whom he idolised, the other of whom he hated, dominated over and tormented. As for finding ‘light and beauty’ in cities in other countries, he found this particularly in buildings, which he later described in terms of their integrating mass-effect on the ego (Klein 1932: 273).
‘Marble, when in such beautiful proportions, has the attractions of a little model or a delicate doll's house – definite, complete and suggestive only of itself’, he wrote admiringly in recalling his post-Oxford visit to see the Taj Mahal in India. He recalled too seeing Benares from a boat on the Ganges – ‘a mass of colours and cracked storeys forming the wonderful sweep of the river crowned by a Venetian sky’, ‘the mosque of Auranzebe with its high minarets’, and ‘half-hidden, half-forgotten, temples and palaces merging into open country’ (Stokes 1925: 160, 171).
‘By doorway, in relief, on window and chimney-piece, Francesco di Giorgio, Agostino di Duccio, Luciano Laurana emblazoned the arms of Europe’, he wrote of buildings he later saw in cities near the eastern seaboard of Italy (Stokes 1926: 45). ‘The universality of arabesque decoration in the Renaissance, beside frequency of domed buildings, demonstrate how deeply Mahommedan variant of Byzantine culture had penetrated beneath the skin of the West’, he also wrote in praising the influence of Byzantine Ravenna on architecture in Rimini (Stokes 1929b: 44).
The German scholar Heinrich Wölfflin had praised Renaissance buildings in Italy presenting ‘extremely clear solids’ with ‘definite proportions of planes and solids’, revealing an entire ‘self-contained life’ (Kite 2009a: 100, 101). Perhaps this influenced Stokes. Certainly, he applauded in terms similar to those adopted by Wölfflin the courtyard designed by Luciano Laurana and built in the early Renaissance for the ducal palace in Urbino. ‘The stone, then, lies on the brick in low relief, yet stands out simple, distinct, a white magic, nitidezza [clearness]’, he wrote in emphasising the uniqueness of each pilaster flowering from the brick, the whole containing and unifying ‘Ones each as single as the Whole’ (Stokes 1932: 133, 134 – italics in original).
‘An effect of mass is one connected with solidity or density of threedimensional objects’, he argued. ‘[S]olids afford an effect of mass only when they allow the immediate, the instantaneous synthesis that the eye alone of the senses can perform’, he continued. This mass-effect is particularly well achieved by an undecorated wall with variations of colour and tone, which, he maintained, ‘the eye with one flash discovers coherent, so that perceptions of succession belonging to any estimate of length or height or density, retire in favour of a feeling’; he went on, ‘that here you witness a concatenation, a simultaneity, that the object is exposed to you, all of it all at once’ (Stokes 1932: 134 – italics in original).
Stokes applauded in these terms the facade and encasement designed by Leon Battista Alberti for the transformation, in 1450, of a Romanesque church in Rimini into an early Renaissance temple, the Tempio Malatestiano. ‘It is true that the massive centrality of the [facade's] door is emphasized’, he acknowledged. ‘Yet the ratio between the shapes, between the oblong imposts, the depth of the stylobate ledge, the blankness of the blind arcades, and the triangular depth of the pediment, overcome the massive centrality in favour of a general steadfastness’ (Stokes 1934: 264).
He praised too the steadying effect of the transformation of inner ferment into outer form achieved in paintings by Alberti's near contemporary, Piero della Francesca. Examples included Piero's oil painting, ‘The Nativity’, in London's National Gallery, in which, Stokes noted, ‘light-grey bricks of the manger's open wall’ and ‘the silver greys of the landscape and of the township’ are built with ‘shapes and declivities that together with the angels achieve synthesis in the Virgin's grey-blue robe’ (Stokes 1937a: 80). ‘Connexion is always architectural in the sense of a division of an order’, he added in summarising the effect of Piero's fresco paintings in Arezzo showing ‘the darkness of an aperture circled with stone and the dark centres of eyes flanked with their whites’ and ‘an emperor's conical hat surrounded by heads of coiled, pleated hair against a background of arches and circular disks’. Like the best early Renaissance buildings, Piero's paintings show, Stokes maintained, ‘the mind becalmed, exemplified in the guise of the separateness of ordered outer things’ (Stokes 1949: 198).
By the time this was published, Klein had theorised the ego as constituted by ‘paranoid-schizoid’ part-object representations of the mother and others, and by their ‘depressive position’ representation as loved, hatefully attacked, repaired and whole (Klein 1946: 16). To this, Stokes added Klein's argument that ‘depressive anxiety, guilt and the reparative tendency are only experienced when feelings of love for the object predominate over destructive impulses’ (Klein 1948: 36). He went on to praise buildings in Italian cities in these terms. ‘We are grateful to stone buildings for their stubborn material, hacked and hewed but put together carefully, restored in better shape than those pieces that the infant imagined he had chewed or scattered’, he wrote. He praised buildings that, through their form, convey ‘accentuated otherness’ and ‘self-subsistence’ rather than ‘juxta-positions through which we are made vividly conscious of tensions of the mind’. He praised architecture that ‘resuscitates an early hunger or greed in the disposition of morsels that are smooth with morsels that are rough’, and which, with its openings, suggests infantile fantasies of tearing the mother's body with ‘revengeful teeth’ and its outcome – ‘fierce yet smoothed’ (Stokes 1951: 241, 242, 243).
‘Such is the return of the mourned mother in all her calm and beauty and magnificence. She was mourned owing to the strength of greed, owing to the wealth of attacks that have been made on her attributes’, he argued. ‘And so, we welcome the appearance or re-appearance of the whole object which by contradistinction has helped to unify the ego; the joining, under one head, of love and of apparent neglect’ (Stokes 1951: 243). ‘One of the pleasures of reading Mr. Stokes's writings on art has always been in the discovery of a poet's sensitivity to the textures and – one might almost say – the “soul” of the various building stones of Italy’, admired Michael Swan in The Spectator, also noting Stokes's psychoanalytic development of the architectural historian Geoffrey Scott's dictum: ‘we both transcribe ourselves into terms of architecture and architecture into terms of ourselves’ (Swan 1951: 392).
‘We can always discover from aesthetic experience the sense of homogeneity or fusion combined, in differing proportions, with the sense of object-otherness’, Stokes told a meeting of the Imago Group of artists and psychoanalysts, which he helped found in 1954 (Stokes 1955a: 110). ‘Art, if only by implication, bears witness to the world of depression or chaos overcome’, he added, perhaps mindful of Klein's diagnosis of his daughter as suffering with the chaos of paranoid-schizoid disintegration (Stokes 1955b: 413).
Increasingly, in subsequent months, he emphasised the integrating influence of architecture, scaled to the human body, in providing an integrated image of the ego or mind. ‘Drawings of Renaissance architects reveal preoccupation with the attempt to relate architectural proportions with those of the human figure’, he noted in a lecture at London's Institute of Contemporary Arts in February 1956. ‘In other words, all graphic art in some sense reconstructs for us a very primitive but forgotten image of the body’ (Stokes 1956a: 21). ‘[I]n the best periods of the Renaissance, building was deeply felt as the giant of the body’, he insisted (Stokes 1956b: 278–9). ‘Freud said the motto of analysis was: where the id was ego shall be. I think it will do as well for art, i.e. the projection of a stable body-image, attacked as it is on every side’, he told the art critic, Herbert Read (Stokes 1956c: n.p.).
‘[A]n imago of ego-integration’, he now argued, ‘comes to us from the external world in the terms of a whole and independent and corporeal-seeing structure’. It answers ‘anxiety concerning ego-integration’ by conveying ‘balance, pattern, movement, rhythm, surface quality (that is, texture), volume, proportion of parts to the whole’. As ‘a self-contained object’, art ‘crystallizes experience’ through its ‘otherness’ and simultaneous oneness with the self in ‘realizing the structure, the stability, of the ego-figure in the very terms of object-otherness’ (Stokes 1958: 98, 99, 109, 114).
Stokes followed this by illustrating the integrating mass-effect of architecture symbolising the body in giving form to the ego in a talk about Romanesque churches in France. ‘I shall be remarking the most generalized imagery that, in my view, a due proportion of masses, between textures, of light and shade, of mass and space, void and aperture, serves to express’, he told the Imago Group. ‘In the fusion of stone shapes, then we may apprehend the symbol of a whole body: a due proportion of darkness, light, rectangularity, roundness, roughness, smoothness, wall, aperture, may provide both solace and reassurance’, he continued, referring to a photo of Saint-Trinit in the Vaucluse. ‘A further connexion with ourselves and with others evolves from the interrelation of planes, volumes, textures, in that they serve the corporeal image – it can only be a corporeal image – of mental or emotional stability’, he emphasised (Stokes 1961a: 196, 197).
Stokes's emphasis on the mass-effect of architecture in providing a stable and integrated image of the body, and thus of the ego, had its ramifications in his account of modern art, which in turn arguably influenced a revolution in psychoanalysis. After the end of his six years’ psychoanalytic treatment by Melanie Klein in 1935, and after applauding the integrating mass-effect of Luciano Laurana's courtyard in Urbino, he applauded in similar terms abstract modern art paintings by his close friend, Ben Nicholson.
I have always been able to discover in [Nicholson's] non-representational work, and in very few other works of this kind, the slow elucidation and isolation of factors that are constant in all that is pleasurable in the process of visual perception … I mean exercise, physical exercise of those synthetic powers which the eye as a visual organ has developed in association with the brain [whereby] basic fantasies of inner disorder find their calm and come to be identified with an objective harmony.
(Stokes 1937b: 315–16)
He likewise praised Picasso's painting ‘Woman with a Mandoline’. ‘In terms of two forms “going into” a third, of one texture as the sum of another of larger area and so on, there is perhaps expressed the wished-for stabilizing’, he argued, ‘not so much of our personalities as of its qualification by those miscellaneous mixed-up archetypal figures within us, absorbed in childhood, that are by no means at peace among themselves’ (Stokes 1937a: 33–4).
Braque, as well as Picasso, he noted many years later, fragmented and rebuilt the material of their paintings to crystallise experience symbolically as a unified ‘ego-figure’ (Stokes 1958: 114). ‘The thread of life persists, in the case of early Cubist paintings a glass, a pipe, a newspaper, a guitar whose humming now spreads beyond once-sounding walls that have become clean and tactile remains’, he added. ‘Later work by Picasso is more disturbing, since he has broken off and re-combined parts of the body, often adding more than one view of these part-objects’, he continued, ‘the sum of misplaced sections does not suggest the parts of a machine: on the contrary, in the translated bodies, as in the rent room, of Guernica, there exist both horror and pathos as well as aesthetic calm’ (Stokes 1961b: 155).
The following year, perhaps influenced by Stokes, a fellow-member of the Imago Group, the psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion, inaugurated today's continuing revolution in psychoanalysis with his emphasis on psychoanalysts containing and transforming their patients’ otherwise fragmented and meaningless sense-data into meaningful form. He likened this to the mother accepting, containing and transforming her baby's otherwise frightening fragmented experience of itself into ‘a form that it can tolerate’ (Bion 1962: 115).
‘[A]rt devotes itself entirely to sense-data, to every significance attaching to them, in order to focus steadily on integration of the inner world as an outer image’, Stokes had previously argued, in a paper subsequently published together with the response of Bion's psychoanalyst colleague, Donald Meltzer (Stokes 1963: 209). The best art, like the best talking cure interpretation, enables us to experience both aggressive and furious fragmentation, and the integration of the resulting fragments through an ‘orderly process of their reconciliation’, Stokes later added (Stokes 1965: 294).
‘Form, then, ultimately constructs an image or figure of which, in art, the expression of particular feeling avails itself’, he told an audience at the Slade. Again he gave the example of Luciano Laurana's courtyard in Urbino. ‘Each plain yet costly member of this building has the value of a limb: in the co-ordination of the contrasting materials there is equal care for each: together they make stillness that, as it were, breathes’, he now said of this building and its integrated image of the body, and thus of the ego or mind (Stokes 1967: 332, 334).
To this, Stokes added the ‘image in form’ evoked by a modern art construction by Jesús Rafael Soto combining square plaques projected against a background of black and white lines. He also added the ‘image in form’ evoked by Picasso's painting, ‘Three Dancers’, acquired like the Soto construction by the Tate while Stokes was one of its Trustees. ‘[E]very line and tone and division helps in the setting up of various relationships across and down the face of the canvas’, he said of the Picasso painting. Like the best architecture, and like other examples of modern art, it conveys ‘an emotive or poetic whole’ through ‘a rich language of form’ (Stokes 1967: 331, 334).
Applauding Stokes's emphasis on the mass-effect of architecture and modern art in giving integrated, embodied form to the ego, another member of the Imago Group, the artist and art education lecturer Anton Ehrenzweig, allied Stokes's achievement with the then-beginning revolution in psychoanalysis towards today's greater recognition of the role of psychoanalysts in integrating their patients’ otherwise distressingly fragmented experience into integrated form. Just as Stokes described modern art, like the best architecture, uniting fragments as a whole, so too, wrote Ehrenzweig (1967), psychoanalysts had begun to recognise the importance of their function in uniting fragments as a whole in the ego.
‘Ceaseless seas of experience construct the coral mind’, Stokes had long before written (Stokes 1951: 234). ‘A great library is like a coral reef whose exquisite structure as it grows proliferates a living network of connectedness, and its ramification is all of a piece, like knowledge itself’, observed Colin St John Wilson, the architect of London's British Library, in adopting Stokes's ideas about the scaled integration of parts as a whole in architecture and in the ego (McCarthy 2008: 12).
Beginning with the rather different accounts of the ego developed by psychoanalysts from Freud to Lacan, I have sought to show how Stokes arrived at his architecturally based account of the ego by rejecting massive scale in favour of the mass-effect of architecture in giving integrated bodily form to the ego. This, in turn, I argue, determined Stokes's account of modern art and his influence in shaping psychoanalysis today.
My thanks to Adrian Stokes's literary executors, Ian Angus and Telfer Stokes, for copyright permission to include previously unpublished material by Stokes in this chapter.