Reflections on the Nude
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Reflections on the Nude

Adrian Stokes, Adrian Stokes

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Reflections on the Nude

Adrian Stokes, Adrian Stokes

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About This Book

Tavistock Press was established as a co-operative venture between the Tavistock Institute and Routledge & Kegan Paul (RKP) in the 1950s to produce a series of major contributions across the social sciences.
This volume is part of a 2001 reissue of a selection of those important works which have since gone out of print, or are difficult to locate. Published by Routledge, 112 volumes in total are being brought together under the name The International Behavioural and Social Sciences Library: Classics from the Tavistock Press.
Reproduced here in facsimile, this volume was originally published in 1967 and is available individually. The collection is also available in a number of themed mini-sets of between 5 and 13 volumes, or as a complete collection.

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Publisher
Routledge
Year
2013
ISBN
9781136443565
Reflections on the Nude

I. Reflections on the Nude

Vis-à-vis the objects both of the outside world and of the inner world it is rewarding that psycho-analysis distinguishes two kinds of fundamental relationship; yet one of these relationships can be constructed at the expense of, or more usually in addition to, the other form of communion. The two modes are the part-object and the whole-object relationships. The infant's first relationships are with part-objects only, that is to say with objects that are not felt in their own nature to be foreign and altogether separate from himself. The mother's breast and his own stool are primary part-objects, the entire and separate and self-sufficient mother the primary whole-object from whose self-inclusiveness there evolves the realization of the outside world of objects as such, whatever their special functions for the perceiver and although he continues, howbeit to a lesser degree, intruding projections into them, an activity that underlies part-object relationship. Not a philosopher, as was Berkeley, the infant is able in normal development to give ground on the question whether there is an outside world which is real, that is to say, separate at least, if not yet indifferent in some contexts to his own activities. But it will have been no more true of Bishop Berkeley than of other human beings that the object conceived as a whole-object may still be treated emotionally more as a part-object.
The tendency to treat whole-objects at the same time as part-objects is very strong. It involves a degree of merging with, or being enveloped by, the object. In view of the ceaseless projective and introjective processes by which we apprehend, control, and learn, it appears extraordinary that a comprehensive emotional admission of whole-object configurations is attained even fitfully.
On the other hand self-preservation will demand a recognition that the outside world is indeed disjoined, concrete; moreover the infant's growing integration depends on separateness from it. The infant's progression from the paranoid-schizoid position to the depressive, to the feelings, for instance, of loss, guilt, and responsibility rather than of persecution, is bound up with the full admission of self-contained objects in the outside world, in the first instance of the whole mother herself. The relationships to other people and to things of all kinds will partake, if only by contrast, of the relationships to her.
This must be the seemingly heartless opening to some reflections stimulated by an aspect of the nude. While the nude is by no means the whole-object prototype, it can provide imaginative translation of that prototype. Yet the word 'nude' will seem harsh to many when it does not suggest nakedness only.
We cannot discover in our own bodies the nude entirety. Narcissistic sensitivity obscures contemplation. Sex-organs often continue to be viewed as part-objects unintegrated with the tenor of the body; appendages of a temper and need averted from the delicate interaction within the organism, even to the extent of the body being conceived as an attribute of the organ, an attribution that does not dominate at least the conception of the nude, which is here thought of as enduring figuration (though the object of many intense passions) and as identical with the object that was for long the object par excellence for art students.
But if the nude in this sense is a somewhat rarefied conception, it remains an immense power. The human body thus conceived is a promise of sanity. Throughout history the totality of the nude may rarely have shone, yet the potential power will have made itself deeply felt. I propose that the respect thus founded for the general body is the seal upon our respect for other human beings as such (and even for consistently objective attitudes to things as such); an important factor, therefore, in regard not only to respect but to tolerance and benevolence.
As well as for basic drives the world of objects is the setting for our projective, introjective, and splitting processes. These processes do not of themselves in many instances give rise to tolerance and respect for the objects employed. On the other hand the self-sufficiency where it is allowed to the nude, who may be the target of intense sexuality also as an independent object, accompanies our own integration or totality, our own integration of drives and character-traits. The respect for self-sufficient objects is the extension of self-respect. From this brotherhood, as it were, of the potential nude the fellow-feeling can extend at least contemplatively to every variety of psychical construction however misguided or inadequate.
It was more difficult in the past when the world was full of utter strangers, particularly in regard to their values, to culture, or to one class in contrast with another. If we are now on the way to a multi-racial culture it is partly because no custom, no ritual, no thought nor act is as incomprehensible, as distant from ourselves. Those with whom we can initially somewhat identify have multiplied even while we use them, as they have always been used, for projective purposes.
Such broad identification is the result of contact not with an aspect that a person presents to us but with the idea of his wholeness or potential wholeness since he is an inheritor, however far removed, of the mother who originally evoked our solicitude, our anxiety, as a precious whole-object that could be lost and destroyed for ever. Thus the fellow human being is by definition a whole-object who may command initially—of course it is only initially—a degree of our solicitude. This is, however, a very important adjunct of humane attitudes. Whereas there are many closer forms of identification, none of them applies this to the stranger qua stranger to whom in his capacity as a human being we are likely today to be most polite not only for atavistic reasons. This tie we have with him will probably lessen as we get to know him since he now looms very largely as a series of attitudes and aptitudes and certainly as the object of our projections which may be negative. We may then translate him in addition into a part-object, the possessor of some trait or function the over-riding emphasis of which becomes almost a fetish. It is as if we had entered a party, joined a conglomeration of heads and straining faces, ours among them, a succession of presences and absences with which we are compounded, that advance in answer to our call but do not always as easily retreat. Yet this merging with an object is often the tritest form of intimacy though at other times the mode of deepest sympathy and of capitulation or control.
Our constant projection and introjection tend to increase, I have indicated, the part-object aspect of relationship; not however exclusively, since in the majority of adult contacts we have already acknowledged as whole-objects, that is to say in feeling no less than in conscious judgement, what we may also treat as part-objects. The dramatic example, once more, is the temperate artist painting the nude, an act still preserved in at least some rooms of art schools. All endeavour should be to contemplate this object as entire, together with the surroundings. The face and head are but part of the body for that contemplative work in which we do not seek to reduce the form to the terms of mouth or eye, to the terms of a single function. I myself prefer the model to be, to remain, a stranger. One will consult her comfort but not the concerns that are less immediate She is an entire presence engaging the allegiance produced in the act of drawing. Artists sometimes harbour a love or brotherhood that binds them to strangers in the light of their mere presence (whereas other people tend to provide at once for strangers a narrower context, however mistaken). Nevertheless aesthetic construction itself entails an envelopment also in the re-creation of a whole-object. I have called this aspect the component of invitation, the invitation to merge with the object [1].
How hard it is, then, particularly in social life to amplify the realization of whole-objects that we try to sustain. Indeed it often appears that we best foster a contact with whole-objects from a distance. Hence a perennial attraction of spectacles, of the theatre, of games, of all happenings in which people speak with their bodies as well as with their mouths. In such experiences if we ignore the crowd we can strengthen the norm of adult relationship with fellows and with Nature. And if it is difficult to value our neighbours for their wholeness, we may be able nevertheless to personalize the hive to which we belong. Further, we keep and constantly observe domestic animals who live out their lives as complicated bodies from nose to tail. The domestic animal, though not the pet, is an antithesis to the face and voice of the crowd. A crowd is no more than one fibre of a person who will never be constructed.
I do not mean to deny that face or head is by far the most expressive attribute of a person; expressive, that is, of the whole person. This succinct documentation, however, of wear and tear or of their absence may cause us to overlook the even circulation that animates a complicated structure.
Possibly the nakedness of some primitive peoples will have strengthened their grip upon sanity even though their nudity will have dramatized an extreme part-object attitude to conceptions contrasting with the whole body, namely the mask, the ceremonial face, together with a figuring forth of Spirit or Mana and the ghosts of the dead. A construction of whole-objects in primitive art has force but not a pre-eminent force. Whereas the wrapped, muffled Eskimo, deprived of nakedness, has probably been in worse case, the deformation of the body and its camouflaging fragmentation by painting and tattooing on the part of naked tribes have shown that a posesssion of the nude epitome of whole-objects has largely been gratuitous; a possession to be minimized. Of course clothes redress the balance since they are apt to dramatize the body's contours. However, as Greek art and Greek Olympiads suggest, a conception of the undivided nude is an unique attainment of tremendous import.
We realize insufficiently how rare have been potent symbols of whole-objects outside art and science and constructiveness in general. The history of ordinary building is a saga of tomb-womb-house [2]. Another part-object, the good breast, is the common fount of all that is good. But without a concomitant development of the good breast into the good whole-object we cannot be at home in an adult world: we cannot discern sufficiently between ourselves and objects nor feel the respect and brotherhood of which I have spoken with the stranger.
Where there is no call for fear or envy or the projection of hate—even today this must be a rare situation—the usage, I repeat, of extreme politeness to the stranger is a tribute to the whole-object model. Such goodwill, of course, is no guarantee of true fellowship: it often evaporates upon any intimacy, as if we were discovering that this self-sufficient entity, though entire, is not the prime whole-object, not the mother from whom we derived the good breast. Any communication with the stranger can dim even this connection; we no longer have on our hands the embodiment only of an entire human being but sectional demands and compulsions, his and our own. But I submit that the side-tracking emphases of intimacy are happiest if that first impersonal love for the whole figure at the root of respect has not been completely overborne. I call this love impersonal not because it did not arise with one person, not because it is not principally lavished still, let us hope, upon one person and one family, but because it can extend also to each individual ...

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