ABSTRACT
"I was glad to hear about the fruitful time you had in Italy and very interested in your plans for the book," Melanie Klein told Adrian Stokes, referring to his renamed book, Smooth and Rough. With the resulting chapters Stokes helped pioneer the use of psychoanalysis as a means of understanding aesthetic experience both of art and of the world more generally around. "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," applauded a review in The Spectator. In Bucklebury, Stokes got to know a psychoanalytically minded neighbour and composer, Robert Still, with whom he played tennis, and began work on an opera, Oedipus. By then Stokes's insistence on getting Telfer psychoanalysed had somewhat abated.
