The modern history of art, if we date its inception from the writings of Heinrich Wölfflin, has been practiced almost exactly as long as the psychoanalysis of art. Freud's essay, Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood was written in 1910, only five years before Wölfflin's codification of the Principles of Art History. At that point the two disciplines were clearly separate: Freud's essay is predominantly biography, as its title indicates; but Wölfflin's enterprise stringently excludes biography and all facts except categories of forms.

Now, some 70 years later, the differences between psychoanalytic explanations of art, psychological explanations, biographical explanations, and art historical explanations are obscured. The issues which once separated the disciplines, and which have prevented their easy collaboration up to the present, have been submerged in a number of thriving but ill-defined subdisciplines. Since each variety has made interesting contributions to the study of art, together they give the impression