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In their efforts to understand the psychology of art and of creative processes, psychoanalysts and psychoanalytically oriented scholars have, in recent years, turned for enlightenment increasingly to question so of form and style, rather than subject matter. The earlier pursuit of the determining unconscious fantasy, in the context of a drive psychology model, has proved of little value in elucidating or defining what is specific to the artistic product or the processes that generate it. Current work, therefore, tends to focus more sharply on the role of ego functions, particularly those in Hartmann's "autonomous" sphere, as they give shape and structure to whatever conscious or unconscious affective and ideational elements enter into the artist's work.
The history of art bears witness to the dominance, at every era, of certain governing modes of representation that characterize the recognizable and identifiable style of the period. We can readily distinguish an Egyptian from a Byzantine from a Renaissance fresco painting, irrespective of variations determined by the hand of the artist or artists who created it. Every artist works either within or in reaction to the dominant mode of representation of his or her time; it is the rare genius who is able to rupture the mold and create a new representational paradigm—a process in art akin to Kuhn's model of a "scientific revolution."
It is this process of stylistic evolution that Blatt, an eminent clinical and research psychologist, in collaboration with his wife, an art historian, has sought to explain. To do so, he uses as his conceptual base the developmental psychology of Jean Piaget and attempts to correlate the successive representational modes in Western art to