A very interesting statement of one of our contemporaries is that any person, to one degree or another, is both a psychologist and a philosopher - they say, life forces him to. On the one hand, the main driving force of every person is the craving for knowledge, the desire to reach certain social heights, the desire to be wise in any everyday situations - and this is the philosophy of life. Leonardo da Vinci by Sigmund Freud (best ereader for comics txt) 📖
- Author: Sigmund Freud
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However, even if one had at his disposal a very rich historical material and could manage the psychic mechanism with the greatest certainty, a psychoanalytic investigation could not possibly furnish the definite view, if it concerns two important questions, that the individual could turn out only so and not differently. Concerning Leonardo we had to represent the view that the accident of his illegitimate birth and the pampering of his mother exerted the most decisive influence on his character formation and his later fate, through the fact that the sexual repression following this infantile phase caused him to sublimate his libido into a thirst after knowledge, and thus determined his sexual inactivity for his entire later life. The repression, however, which followed the first erotic gratification of childhood did not have to take place, in another individual it would perhaps not have taken place or it would have turned out not nearly as profuse. We must recognize here a degree of freedom which can no longer be solved psychoanalytically. One is as little justified in representing the issue of this shift of repression as the only possible issue. It is quite probable that another person would not have succeeded in withdrawing the main part of his libido from the repression through sublimation into a desire for knowledge; under the same influences as Leonardo another person might have sustained a permanent injury to his intellectual work or an uncontrollable disposition to compulsion neurosis. The two characteristics of Leonardo which remained unexplained through psychoanalytic effort are first, his particular tendency to repress his impulses, and second, his extraordinary ability to sublimate the primitive impulses.
The impulses and their transformations are the last things that psychoanalysis can discern. Henceforth it leaves the place to biological investigation. The tendency to repression, as well as the ability to sublimate, must be traced back to the organic bases of the character, upon which alone the psychic structure springs up. As artistic talent and productive ability are intimately connected with sublimation we have to admit that also the nature of artistic attainment is psychoanalytically inaccessible to us. Biological investigation of our time endeavors to explain the chief traits of the organic constitution of a person through the fusion of male and female predispositions in the material sense; Leonardo's physical beauty as well as his left-handedness furnish here some support. However, we do not wish to leave the ground of pure psychologic investigation. Our aim remains to demonstrate the connection between outer experiences and reactions of the person over the path of the activity of the impulses. Even if psychoanalysis does not explain to us the fact of Leonardo's artistic accomplishment, it still gives us an understanding of the expressions and limitations of the same. It does seem as if only a man with Leonardo's childhood experiences could have painted Monna Lisa and Saint Anne, and could have supplied his works with that sad fate and so obtain unheard of fame as a natural historian; it seems as if the key to all his attainments and failures was hidden in the childhood phantasy of the vulture.
But may one not take offense at the results of an investigation which concede to the accidents of the parental constellation so decisive an influence on the fate of a person, which, for example, subordinates Leonardo's fate to his illegitimate birth and to the sterility of his first step-mother Donna Albiera? I believe that one has no right to feel so; if one considers accident as unworthy of determining our fate, it is only a relapse to the pious aspect of life, the overcoming of which Leonardo himself prepared when he put down in writing that the sun does not move. We are naturally grieved over the fact that a just God and a kindly providence do not guard us better against such influences in our most defenseless age. We thereby gladly forget that as a matter of fact everything in our life is accident from our very origin through the meeting of spermatozoa and ovum, accident, which nevertheless participates in the lawfulness and fatalities of nature, and lacks only the connection to our wishes and illusions. The division of life's determinants into the "fatalities" of our constitution and the "accidents" of our childhood may still be indefinite in individual cases, but taken altogether one can no longer entertain any doubt about the importance of precisely our first years of childhood. We all still show too little respect for nature, which in Leonardo's deep words recalling Hamlet's speech "is full of infinite reasons which never appeared in experience."[78] Every one of us human beings corresponds to one of the infinite experiments in which these "reasons of nature" force themselves into experience.
THE END
[1] In the words of J. Burckhard, cited by Alexandra Konstantinowa, Die Entwicklung des Madonnentypus by Leonardo da Vinci, Strassburg, 1907.
[2] Vite, etc. LXXXIII. 1550-1584.
[3] Traktat von der Malerei, new edition and introduction by Marie Herzfeld, E. Diederichs, Jena, 1909.
[4] Solmi. La resurrezione dell' opera di Leonardo in the collected work; Leonardo da Vinci. Conferenze Florentine, Milan, 1910.
[5] Scognamiglio Ricerche e Documenti sulla giovinezza di Leonardo da Vinci. Napoli, 1900.
[6] W. v. Seidlitz. Leonardo da Vinci, der Wendepunkt der Renaissance, 1909, Bd. I, p. 203.
[7] W. v. Seidlitz, l. c. Bd. II, p. 48
[8] W. Pater. The Renaissance, p. 107, The Macmillan Co., 1910. "But it is certain that at one period of his life he had almost ceased to be an artist."
[9] Cf. v. Seidlitz, Bd. I die Geschichte der Restaurations—und Rettungsversuche.
[10] Müntz. Léonard de Vinci, Paris, 1899, p. 18. (A letter of a contemporary from India to a Medici alludes to this peculiarity of Leonardo. Given by Richter: The literary Works of Leonardo da Vinci.)
[11] F. Botazzi. Leonardo biologo e anatomico. Conferenze Florentine, p. 186, 1910.
[12] E. Solmi: Leonardo da Vinci. German Translation by Emmi Hirschberg. Berlin, 1908.
[13] Marie Herzfeld: Leonardo da Vinci der Denker, Forscher und Poet. Second edition. Jena, 1906.
[14] His collected witticisms—belle facezie,—which are not translated, may be an exception. Cf. Herzfeld, Leonardo da Vinci, p. 151.
[15] According to Scognamiglio (l. c. p. 49) reference is made to this episode in an obscure and even variously interpreted passage of the Codex Atlanticus: "Quando io feci Domeneddio putto voi mi metteste in prigione, ora s'io lo fo grande, voi mi farete peggio."
[16] Merejkowski: The Romance of Leonardo da Vinci, translated by Herbert Trench, G. P. Putnam Sons, New York. It forms the second of the historical Trilogy entitled Christ and Anti-Christ, of which the first volume is Julian Apostata, and the third volume is Peter the Great and Alexei.
[17] Solmi l. c. p. 46.
[18] Filippo Botazzi, l. c. p. 193.
[19] Marie Herzfeld: Leonardo da Vinci, Traktat von der Malerei, Jena, 1909 (Chap. I, 64).
[20] "Such transfiguration of science and of nature into emotions, or one might say, religion, is one of the characteristic traits of da Vinci's manuscripts, which one finds expressed hundreds of times." Solmi: La resurrezione, etc, p. 11.
[21] La resurrezione, etc., p. 8: "Leonardo placed the study of nature as a precept to painting ... later the passion for study became dominating, he no longer wished to acquire science for art, but science for science' sake."
[22] For an enumeration of his scientific attainments see Marie Herzfeld's interesting introduction (Jena, 1906) to the essays of the Conference Florentine, 1910, and elsewhere.
[23] For a corroboration of this improbable sounding assertion see the "Analysis of the Phobia of a Five-year-old Boy," Jahrbuch für Psychoanalytische und Psychopathologische Forschungen, Bd. I, 1909, and the similar observation in Bd. II, 1910. In an essay concerning "Infantile Theories of Sex" (Sammlungen kleiner Schriften zur Neurosenlehre, p. 167, Second Series, 1909), I wrote: "But this reasoning and doubting serves as a model for all later intellectual work in problems, and the first failure acts as a paralyzer for all times."
[24] Scognamiglio 1. c., p. 15.
[25] Cited by Scognamiglio from the Codex Atlanticus, p. 65.
[26] Cf. here the "Bruchstück einer Hysterieanalyse," in Neurosenlehre, Second series, 1909.
[27] Horapollo: Hieroglyphica I, II. Μητἑρα δἑ γρἁφοντες ... γὑπα ζωγραφοὑσιυ
[28] Roscher: Ausf. Lexicon der griechischen und römischen Mythologie. Artikel Mut, II Bd., 1894-1897.—Lanzone. Dizionario di Mitologia egizia. Torino, 1882.
[29] H. Hartleben, Champollion. Sein Leben und sein Werk, 1906.
[30] "γὑπα δἑ ἁρρενα οὑ φασνγἑνεσθαι ποτε, ἁιλἁ φηλεἱας ἁπἁσας," cited by v. Römer. Über die androgynische Idee des Lebens, Jahrb. f. Sexuelle Zwischenstufen, V, 1903, p. 732.
[31] Plutarch: Veluti scarabaeos mares tantum esse putarunt Aegyptii sic inter vultures mares non inveniri statuerunt
[32] Horapollinis Niloi Hieroglyphica edidit Conradus Leemans Amstelodami, 1835. The words referring to the sex of the vulture read as follows (p. 14): "μητἑρα μἑν ἑπειδἡ ἁρρεν ἑν τοὑτω γἑνει τὡων οὑχ ὑπἁρχει."
[33] E. Müntz, 1. c., p. 282.
[34] E. Müntz, 1. c.
[35] See the illustrations in Lanzone l. c. T. CXXXVI-VIII.
[36] v. Römer l. c.
[37] Cf. the observations in the Jahrbuch für Psychoanalytische und Psychopathologische Forschungen, Vol. I, 1909.
[38] Cf. Richard Payne Knight: The Cult of Priapus.
[39] Prominently among those who undertook these investigations are I. Sadger, whose results I can essentially corroborate from my own experience. I am also aware that Stekel of Vienna, Ferenczi of Budapest, and Brill of New York, came to the same conclusions.
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