Book
Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of his Childhood
Eine Kindheitserinnerung des Leonardo da Vinci
Freud's study of Leonardo da Vinci, published in 1910 as the seventh number of the series Schriften zur angewandten Seelenkunde, is the first book-length psychoanalytic biography. It sets out to explain two features of Leonardo's life that his biographers recorded: the slowness and inhibition with which he painted, leaving many works unfinished as the investigator in him gradually overtook the artist, and a sexual life that seemed cool and abstinent, with an idealised attachment to handsome pupils. Freud builds his reading on a single note in Leonardo's notebooks, the recollection that as he lay in his cradle a bird (a 'vulture', Geier, in the German translation Freud used) came down and struck his lips with its tail. He treats it as a fantasy formed later in life and projected back into infancy, and reads it as a disguised memory of sucking at the mother's breast and of her kisses, recast as a passive homosexual scene. From the Egyptian hieroglyph in which the vulture stands for 'mother', and from the ancient fable that all vultures are female and conceive from the wind, he infers that the illegitimate Leonardo spent his first years alone with his mother Caterina, a 'vulture child' with a mother and no father, before he was taken into the house of his father, Ser Piero, and his childless wife. On this ground Freud builds a developmental account. The mother's tenderness made the boy sexually precocious and intensely curious; a wave of repression ended that phase, and most of his libido was sublimated into an insatiable urge to research, while a smaller part, fixated on the repressed love for the mother, became an ideal homosexual love in which he chose boys in his own image and loved them as his mother had loved him. The study goes on to the smile of the Mona Lisa and the strangely young Saint Anne of the Louvre painting, read as the revival of the mother's smile and a picture of the two mothers of his childhood; to a slip in Leonardo's note on his father's death; to his independence from authority, the ancients and religion, as the achievement of a son who grew up without a father's intimidation; and to the late regression in which the revived memory of the mother briefly freed his painting. Freud closes by marking the limits of the method: psychoanalysis cannot explain artistic talent or the capacity for sublimation, and must leave room for chance and organic constitution.
Main ideas
- Pathography does not seek to blacken the great: the psychic laws that govern ordinary and neurotic people govern exceptional ones too, and biographers who idealise their hero as a stand-in for the childhood father trade the truth for an illusion.
- Leonardo's cradle memory is a fantasy formed later and projected back into infancy, as peoples compose their early histories after the fact; beneath it lie the memories of nursing and of the mother's kisses, recast as a passive homosexual scene.
- The 'vulture' links the fantasy to the Egyptian mother-goddess Mut and to the fable that vultures are all female and conceive from the wind: Freud infers that Leonardo felt himself a child with a mother and no father. (The bird Leonardo names is in fact a kite; the German translation Freud relied on gave 'vulture'.)
- Infantile sexual research, once repressed, has three possible fates: inhibition of thinking, compulsive brooding, or sublimation of the drive into a general desire to know. Leonardo is the rare and most complete case of the third.
- Leonardo converted passion into the urge to know, investigating instead of loving; research, which began in the service of his art, became the stronger and inhibited the painter.
- A type of male homosexuality: an intense early bond to the mother in the father's absence, repression of that love through identification with her, and a narcissistic object choice of boys who stand for the self, loved as the mother loved him.
- The child's theory that the mother has a penis is the common source of the androgynous, phallic mother-goddesses of antiquity and of the bird's tail in Leonardo's fantasy.
- The enigmatic smile of the Mona Lisa revived the lost smile of Leonardo's mother; the Louvre Saint Anne, with its two young mothers, condenses his childhood with Caterina and his stepmother Donna Albiera.
- The repeated hour in Leonardo's note on his father's death is a perseveration that betrays suppressed feeling; he treated his works as his father had treated him, creating and abandoning them.
- Having grown up without a father's intimidation, Leonardo could dispense with authority, the ancients and personal religion, and study nature by his own observation.
- His life shows two regressions: in Milan the researcher gradually displaced the artist; in his fifties a woman's smile revived the memory of the mother and for a time overcame the inhibition of his art.
- Psychoanalysis cannot explain artistic talent, the tendency to repress or the capacity to sublimate; these rest on organic constitution, and chance has its share in every life.