Freud and Leonardo: Clash of the Titans

All agree that Leonardo was a creative genius, amply demonstrated by his body of work, but Freud as a creative genius is more contentious. He created a new vision of our inner life matched by a challenging body of theory and generated a movement in his name that far exceeded it. Freud’s major works have only gradually, and never totally, been disengaged from his life, and, despite claims to scientific objectivity buttressed by generations of analysts, the sense of his presence persists. In somewhat similar fashion, a computer analysis of the Mona Lisa has discovered Leonardo’s underlying features (Lillian Schwartz, “Leonardo’s ‘Mona Lisa,’” Art and Antiques, Jan. 1987, pp. 50-54). So far, it is fair to say that for all their different modes of operation, both Leonardo and Freud to a degree were creating themselves through their cultural labors. Although centuries separate their lives, their creative energies intersect in revealing ways. After all, Leonardo’s notebooks on engineering, flight, and weaponry demonstrate an investment in science strong enough to compete with his artistic output. Freud’s masterful prose style won the Goethe Prize for Literature in 1930.

The more intriguing intersection stems from Freud’s fascination with creative geniuses and his responses that began appear-

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ing in his 1908 paper, “Creative Writers and Daydreaming” (Standard Edition, 9, pp. 141-156). Like his dream analysis (1900) which served as the foundation of his new theory, the daydream is bound by the wish fulfillment of the pleasure-principle and is narcissistic in the everyday sense of being self-centered. But the two studies pull in opposite directions: dreaming adds layers to our subjective ingenuity by striving to make the unconscious conscious, whereas daydreaming severely circumscribes the creative scope and is reduced to “fore-pleasure.” With lip service to the artist’s technique as his/her innermost secret, his foregrounding of psychic process over aesthetic product has advantages; but it indiscriminately loops in pulp fiction, historical romance, soap opera, kitsch, and the whole James Bond corpus along with Crime and Punishment and other world masterpieces. Consider for a moment that Madame Bovary conducts a critique of romantic daydreaming, not an enactment, and yet the fact that Flaubert identified with his heroine and even became ill when she took poison points to the elusive depths and unpredictable reach of the creative enterprise.

In the visual arts, Freud’s day-dream-take would apply to the schmaltzy thatched-cottage, babling-brook pastorals of Thomas Kincaid as well as to Munch’s The Scream and Picasso’s Guernica—not a promising prospect. Three years later, Freud instanced art as one means for reconciling the pleasure and the reality principles and more generously allowed that the artist, after turning in frustration from reality, remolds his/her fantasy into a new kind of reality (Standard Edition, p. 12). Granting that Freud had his agenda, he knew better, and he outgrew these rudimentary formulas without revising them. What he did, however, was far more interesting and revealing.

Freud’s own creative career was both multi-faceted and lifelong. His self-analysis, for example, generated a technique that opened up an entirely new approach to treating emotional conflicts. His thinking evolved into three successive psychic models: 1) the earliest trauma model of repressed memories gave way to a subsistent psychic reality by 1900, to be widely applied and refined into 2) the topographic model of 1915, which expanded and grew more complex in 3) the structural hypothesis of 1923, which opened the way to ego-psychology.

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It was in the middle period (1900-1915) that Freud embarked on an ambitious project to assimilate all mental processes as well as cultural forms to psychoanalytic theory. These included infantile sexuality, jokes, the omnipotence of thought (for example, magical thinking among preliterate peoples), slips of the tongue, therapeutic techniques, and creative processes as an elaboration of day-dreaming. Two themes from this period converge on the Leonardo study: infantile sexuality and creativity. The 1915 model has been disparagingly called by later analysts “the chassis model” of drives and defenses, being on the whole mechanistic—accelerating, swerving, braking. Thereafter, Freud grappled with narcissism, which opened up pre-oedipal phases; with war-neuroses, which took him beyond the pleasure/pain principle to repetition-compulsions and the death instinct; with anxiety, which meant bulking up ego-functions; with mourning and melancholia, which explored how lost love-objects are internalized and built into psychic structure; and, finally, with how guilt and repression are the building blocks of civilization.

The restructured psyche of 1923 expanded to a more complex system of internal operations and generally opened onto a much richer, more inclusive subjectivity factoring in guilt. For example, Freud revisited the comic (“Jokes,” 1905) in the more seasoned essay “Humor” (1928), but he did not apply his new understandings to creative processes as such. Seen from the vantage point of his more complex conceptions, the old mechanistic model of art as bound up with the fore-pleasure afforded by day-dreaming falls way short.

We do, however, have another source to help explain this hiatus. We can look at what transpired in Freud’s personal life when he encountered others’ creativity. With his gifted Viennese contemporary, Arthur Schnitzler, he corresponded but avoided “from a kind of awe of meeting my ‘double’” (Ernest Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, 1957, pp. 3, 443). It seems the great storyteller might put the kibosh on the great story-listener’s originality. The world’s vaunted originals do not take kindly to rivals (and for similar reasons Freud detoured around Nietzsche). His envy over Shakespeare’s genius was so intense that his only recourse was to deny the Bard’s authorship in total and to line up

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with the loony anti-Stratfordian fringe (Harry Trosman, “Freud and the Controversy over Shakespeare Authorship,” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 1965, 13(3), pp. 475-498). But whoever Freud fancied wrote the Shakespearean tragedies, he leaned more heavily on the Bard for the death instinct, according to K.R. Eissler, than on biological sciences (Discourse on Hamlet and Hamlet, 1971, p. 21; these issues are taken up in my Creativity and Culture, 1990, pp. 240-242). Factoring in Sophocles’ tragedy to universalize the Oedipus complex, one concludes that Freud was up to his eyeballs in creative works, and his strategy of denigrating them to day-dreaming best factors into his emotional struggles.

He was in fact so obsessed with Michelangelo’s Moses that after he overcame his resistance to visiting Rome, he made repeated trips to the figure and drew on its supposed display of suppressed rage for strength and insight into his own struggle with heretics in his movement (Ruth Meyer, Clio’s Circle, 2007, pp. 76-80). Art works continued to spur Freud’s self-analysis, and in his last years, Moses and Monotheism (1939) became the consummate act of his self-creation.

Most telling for our present subject is his problematic engaging of Leonardo da Vinci. The analysis of Leonardo was marred, owing not only to his mistaking a key word (kite for vulture, which he later acknowledged), but also to his having misconstrued Leonardo’s early childhood. Here is the key passage: “Among the first recollections of my infancy,” Leonardo wrote in his notebook, “it seemed to me that, as I was in my cradle, a kite came to me and opened my mouth with its tail, and struck me several times with its tail inside my lips” (quoted in Klaus Herding, “Freud’s Leonardo: A Discussion of Recent Psychoanalytic Theories,” American Imago, 2001, 57(4), p. 344). Freud took the memory as a fantasy but mistook kite for vulture and opened onto a line of associations with the Egyptian Vulture Mother Goddess Mut. The interpretation posited a homosexual fantasy of fellatio and an “attachment evoked or encouraged by too much tenderness” on the mother’s part, who, in the absence of the boy’s father, stimulated feminine identifications (Freud, “Leonardo Da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood,” 1910, Standard Edition, 11:99).

Freud’s reconstruction of Leonardo’s early years is also

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problematic if necessarily sketchy. A few facts are incontestable. Leonardo was conceived by the Florentine notary Ser Piero da Vinci and born out of wedlock to a peasant girl, Caterina. When Piero married Donna Albiera five years later, it is assumed he brought the boy into the household of his otherwise childless marriage. Caterina had meanwhile been married off to a local, dubbed “Trouble-maker.” Freud believed that Leonardo was raised during this five-year period by Caterina (Freud, “Memory,” p. 81). But this scenario is undermined on several counts. Caterina could well have been married off in the boy’s first months, and her husband seems an unlikely paternal presence. Moreover, a woman who had given birth to an illegitimate child was deemed unfit to nurse her baby due to beliefs that her fall from grace contaminated her milk such that her sin would be transmitted to the nursling (Christiane Klapische-Zuber, “Blood Parents and Milk Parents: Wet Nursing in Florence, 1300-1530,” in Women, Family, and Ritual in Renaissance Italy, 1985, pp. 132-164).

A more likely scenario is that Leonardo was brought up at least until five by his doting paternal grandparents (Serge Bramly, Leonardo, 1991, pp. 37-42; Bradley I. Collins, Leonardo, Psychoanalysis, and Art History, 1997, pp. 20-23). It is probable that he was wet-nursed by one or more servants or farm girls in some rural cottage, according to prevailing custom of the day among the gentry.

Hence the ongoing presence of a stimulating natural mother who delayed the separation-individuation process and inadvertently aroused passive homosexual wishes is implausible. In reality, it was Sigmund Freud who had a stimulating natural mother: “mein goldener Sigi, Sigi, mein Gold” (quoted by Deborah P. Margolis, Freud and His Mother, 1996, p. 3). Lacking firm data, Freud filled the gap in psychobiography with ingenious speculations and abundant theory that he glued together with his own infantile emotions and tied to a highly-possessive mother whom he idealized throughout his life despite more conflicted feelings, according to Margolis. Freud may have been initially drawn to his subject by the age disparity in both sets of parents. Ser Piero would have been several years older than Caterina; Freud’s mother was 21 and his father 41 at his birth. In Freud’s imagination, rather than being reared by an obscure country girl, Leonardo is re-parented by a young Victorian

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lady in Freiberg, much like Sigmund’s mother. Thus, Freud’s merger with Leonardo may have reduced feelings of envy sufficiently to incorporate a creative rival into the work of psychoanalysis (turning him, in Heinz Kohut’s term, into a “self-object” to be deployed for mastery of ambivalent feelings, Restoration of the Self, 1977). Yet for all this versatility, one wonders if stretching the original memory-fantasy to over-determine Leonardo’s notions of flight didn’t also entail a flight of ideas on Freud’s part. Thus the analyst would soar on the artist’s wings. Plausibly, Freud’s self-creativity, along with underlying conflicts over priority and originality, may have contributed to his misconstructions of Leonardo’s childhood—perhaps a misguided attempt at self-repair one can only speculate about.

We may at least agree that as Leonardo’s own features underlay his Mona Lisa, so Freud’s subjective experiences were sandwiched into his portrait of Leonardo. Hats off to creativity, which fortunately survives our own psychologizing.

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