Leonardo da Vinci: a Memory of His Childhood and Freud's Rush to Judgment: A Psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud with transcription and commentary by Patrick ... Bruskiewich (The Renaissance Book Series 1)
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Leonardo da Vinci: a Memory of His Childhood and Freud's Rush to Judgment: A Psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud with transcription and commentary by Patrick ... Bruskiewich (The Renaissance Book Series 1) Details
Psychoanalysis answers this question … Sigmund FreudIn reading his 1910 Psychoanalysis “Leonardo da Vinci: A Memory of his Childhood”, Sigmund Freud affirms this statement a number of times to set down his mind-set.Unfortunately, it is evident to any person knowledgeable of the life and achievements of Leonardo, the Viennese professor based his psychoanalysis of this great Renaissance artist and scientist on a somewhat limited understanding of the man and his creativity. Freud also brought forward a number of pre-judgements which clearly prove problematic. Freud set out his goal in judging Leonardo da Vinci in these words: “The object of our work was to explain the inhibitions in Leonardo’s sexual life and in his artistic activity.” However, it is evident that da Vinci was not inhibited in his art and his creativity in any way, shape or form – which puts a dent in Freud’s endeavours as far as the thrust of the psychoanalysis is concerned. It is self-evident that such a complex and enigmatic man as Leonardo cannot be placed in a plain box and neatly tied up with a plain bow. In the commentator’s view, Freud was in a rush to judge Leonardo using his somewhat questionable assumptions and somewhat questionable interpretations of Leonardo’s childhood and da Vinci’s ambivalence towards sexuality. As well, Freud would want you to believe, in a somewhat unpersuasive manner, that Leonardo was both asexual and homosexual at the same time. Modern studies have shown that these two psychologies are somewhat mutually exclusive, and that homosexuals have a super-active libido.Da Vinci, was in Renaissance times, and remains five centuries later, a complex and enigmatic man, unique in his views of the world and his study of the form and function of nature, of which the human condition formed but a significant part. There are very few indications, and tenuous ones at that, that Leonardo da Vinci was homosexual, apart from a few pieces of art and a few words in his manuscripts that can be interpreted in many different ways. For instance, is it possible that his Vitruvian man is a self-portrait in the same genre as say any of the 20th century self-portraits done byEgon Schiele? Such a profiling is not becoming – merely so because Freud says it is so. In fact, Freud’s own neuroses, and his “infamous envy” hardly shows the Viennese Professor himself to have a Venus Envy, along with a number of chauvinisms that have been shown to define his psychoanalysis. Perhaps, by projection, we can say of Freud the sexuality he himself suggests of Leonardo?Leonardo da Vinci understood men and woman, and human sexuality, to be mammalian. He saw man as an animal, similar to but more advanced than other mammals. This is clearly evident in his manuscripts and anatomical studies. Beyond the maleness of his Vitruvian Man, there are his studies of the uterus and the beginnings of life, drawings which are accurate enough to still be found in some medical texts in the 21st century. This clearly works against Freud’s thesis. There is a collage-picture of Sigmund Freud from perhaps three decades ago made up of nothing but male members. I think that is a fitting measure of the phallasms, narcissism and childishness of the Viennese professor. By his own measure, which he applied to Leonardo, we can perhaps declare Sigmund Freud himself a homosexual. There is very little evidence to declare this of Leonardo. As you read Freud’s 1910 commentary, take a moment to appreciate how much better we know Leonardo da Vinci a century after Freud published his problematic analysis, and how it is Freud who should perhaps be the subject of our pyschoanalysis. Leonardo da Vinci was not libidinous, nor rapacious, nor capricious like so many of his Florentine contemporaries like Donatello, Michelangelo or Raphael. He was, without question a dedicated artist, a natural philosopher and a creative genius.
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