‘Dear Stokes’: Letters from Melanie Klein about writing, painting and psychoanalysis

In 1929 Melanie Klein (1882–1960), then relatively newly arrived from Berlin in London, began six years’ psychoanalytic treatment of the writer and painter, Adrian Stokes (1902–72). During and immediately following this treatment Stokes became critically acclaimed for his books applauding Renaissance and modern art, including the avant-garde creations of the ballets russes, for their form- rather than ideas-led inspiration and for their integration of parts as a whole in the mind of the observer. Through bringing his close friends, Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth, to live with him and his artist wife, Margaret Mellis, in Cornwall in 1939, Stokes became the catalyst of the subsequent transformation of St Ives into an international centre of modern art which he continued to promote after the war in books and articles in which he developed the ideas of Freud and Klein in terms of the integrating effect of art on the ego through inviting oneness with its separate otherness. (For further details about the life and work of Klein and Stokes, see Grosskurth, 1986; Sayers, 2000, 2011.)

Unfortunately Klein retained scarcely any letters, even from her immediate family, and none from Stokes. He retained the following letters, the originals of which (as indicated in brackets after the title of each are now with Stokes’s son, Telfer, with the Tate Gallery in London or with Stokes’s widow, Ann. They begin with Klein’s response to a letter from Stokes about Telfer’s birth on 3 October 1940, written when she was staying with the family of one of her patients in Pitlochry in Scotland.

Klein to Stokes, 21 November 1940 (Telfer)

Ashbank

Pitlochry