author - "Sigmund Freud"
to him a high measure of sexual activity.
The peculiarity of this emotional and sexual life viewed in connection with Leonardo's double nature as an artist and investigator can be grasped only in one way. Of the biographers to whom psychological viewpoints are often very foreign, only one, Edm. Solmi, has to my knowledge approached the solution of the riddle. But a writer, Dimitri Sergewitsch Merejkowski, who selected Leonardo as the hero of a great historical novel has based his delineation on such an understanding of this unusual man, and if not in dry words he gave unmistakable utterance in plastic expression in the manner of a poet.[16] Solmi judges Leonardo as follows: "But the unrequited desire to understand everything surrounding him, and with cold reflection to discover the deepest secret of everything that is perfect, has condemned Leonardo's works to remain forever unfinished."[17] In an essay of the Conferenze Fiorentine the utterances of Leonardo are cited, which show his confession of fai
dered me goodservice in the investigation of phobias, obsessions, illusions, and thelike, and which, under the name "psycho-analysis," had found acceptanceby a whole school of investigators. The manifold analogies of dream lifewith the most diverse conditions of psychical disease in the wakingstate have been rightly insisted upon by a number of medical observers.It seemed, therefore, a priori, hopeful to apply to the interpretationof dreams methods of investigation which had been tested inpsychopathological processes. Obsessions and those peculiar sensationsof haunting dread remain as strange to normal consciousness as dodreams to our waking consciousness; their origin is as unknown toconsciousness as is that of dreams. It was practical ends that impelledus, in these diseases, to fathom their origin and formation. Experiencehad shown us that a cure and a consequent mastery of the obsessing ideasdid result when once those thoughts, the connecting links between themorbid ideas and the re
to him a high measure of sexual activity.
The peculiarity of this emotional and sexual life viewed in connection with Leonardo's double nature as an artist and investigator can be grasped only in one way. Of the biographers to whom psychological viewpoints are often very foreign, only one, Edm. Solmi, has to my knowledge approached the solution of the riddle. But a writer, Dimitri Sergewitsch Merejkowski, who selected Leonardo as the hero of a great historical novel has based his delineation on such an understanding of this unusual man, and if not in dry words he gave unmistakable utterance in plastic expression in the manner of a poet.[16] Solmi judges Leonardo as follows: "But the unrequited desire to understand everything surrounding him, and with cold reflection to discover the deepest secret of everything that is perfect, has condemned Leonardo's works to remain forever unfinished."[17] In an essay of the Conferenze Fiorentine the utterances of Leonardo are cited, which show his confession of fai
dered me goodservice in the investigation of phobias, obsessions, illusions, and thelike, and which, under the name "psycho-analysis," had found acceptanceby a whole school of investigators. The manifold analogies of dream lifewith the most diverse conditions of psychical disease in the wakingstate have been rightly insisted upon by a number of medical observers.It seemed, therefore, a priori, hopeful to apply to the interpretationof dreams methods of investigation which had been tested inpsychopathological processes. Obsessions and those peculiar sensationsof haunting dread remain as strange to normal consciousness as dodreams to our waking consciousness; their origin is as unknown toconsciousness as is that of dreams. It was practical ends that impelledus, in these diseases, to fathom their origin and formation. Experiencehad shown us that a cure and a consequent mastery of the obsessing ideasdid result when once those thoughts, the connecting links between themorbid ideas and the re