The visual arts are arguably psychologically healing in giving outward shape and form to what can otherwise be disquietingly shapeless and formless in our inner psyche or spirit. Psychologists, however, often overlook this. So too do psychoanalysts, so much do they focus on art’s inner, unconscious or fantasy meaning. To counter this prevalent neglect of art’s healing outwardness, this article focuses on a marked exception, namely Adrian Stokes. It compares and contrasts his outwardly oriented aesthetics with that of Ruskin, Pater, Nietzsche, Bradley and Pound; with the inward orientation of the writing about art of Freud, Jung, Klein, Segal and Rivière; and with the attention to the inter-relation of inner and outer reality in the post-Freudian writing about literature and the visual arts of Kristeva, Milner, Ehrenzweig and Bion.
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