In this seminar Janet Sayers will draw on material from her recently published biography of the art critic, Adrian Stokes. In particular she will focus on philosophical and emotional factors contributing to Stokes’s emphasis on art as emblem of the realisation of inner life in outer Form; on his psychoanalytic treatment by Melanie Klein; and on his subsequent psychoanalytic account of art in ways which prefigure today’s psychoanalytic attention to chaos and its containment.

The seminar is open free of charge to members of the University and to mental health professionals but space is limited. To attend it is helpful (but not essential) to e-mail paul.tod@sjc.ox.ac.uk