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Le style est l'homme même—BUFFON (3)
Although the literature of art history, criticism, and aesthetics deals extensively with problems of style in many forms and contexts, psycho-analysis has yet to concern itself with a 'psychology of style' (13).2
The present study has no expectation of filling this gap in the understanding of style or of dealing with the enigmatic multidisciplinary problem of artistic style, except in so far as some aspects of it are relevant to the current issue. This is rather a preliminary attempt to define the general problem of style, to explore it as a feature of personality for psycho-analytic study, and to suggest some areas in which psycho-analysis may make a contribution to this theme and reap some benefit, both practical and theoretical, from so doing.
An attempt will be made to show that 'style' is best defined as a progressing synthesis of form and content in an individually typical manner and according to the individual's sense of 'appropriateness'. 'Style' is conceived as an expression of the organizing function3 of the ego, which may display itself in this process in an unusually accessible form. Each individual style has an 'invariant' aspect which may largely be determined by characteristic uses of ambiguity. The suggestion that a study of 'style' may help in the elucidation of some technical problems in the analysis of certain obscure resistances is also discussed. The way in which such a study may be useful in understanding the largely unsystematized 'cues' that are utilized in the diagnosis of 'borderline' states is also suggested. This is not an attempt to formulate any new concepts, but merely a view of some well-known clinical phenomena offered from a different vantage point.
If 'style' is not a primal word in the English language, it does at least partake of the antithetical properties which Freud (7) ascribes to such words in root languages. Derived as it is from the Latin 'stylus', with one end sharpened to cut into