Freud - Complete Works (388 page)

  
¹
These improbable-sounding assertions can be
confirmed from a study of my ‘Analysis of a Phobia in a
Five-Year-Old Boy’ (1909
b
) and of similar
observations. In a paper on ‘The Sexual Theories of
Children’ (1908
c
) I wrote: ‘This brooding and
doubting, however, becomes the prototype of all later intellectual
work directed towards the solution of problems, and the first
failure has a crippling effect on the child’s whole
future.’

Leonardo Da Vinci And A Memory Of His Childhood

2256

   When the period of infantile
sexual researches has been terminated by a wave of energetic sexual
repression, the instinct for research has three distinct possible
vicissitudes open to it owing to its early connection with sexual
interests. In the first of these, research shares the fate of
sexuality; thenceforward curiosity remains inhibited and the free
activity of intelligence may be limited for the whole of the
subject’s lifetime, especially as shortly after this the
powerful religious inhibition of thought is brought into play by
education. This is the type characterized by neurotic inhibition.
We know very well that the intellectual weakness which has been
acquired in this way gives an effective impetus to the outbreak of
a neurotic illness. In a second type the intellectual development
is sufficiently strong to resist the sexual repression which has
hold of it. Some time after the infantile sexual researches have
come to an end, the intelligence, having grown stronger, recalls
the old association and offers its help in evading sexual
repression, and the suppressed sexual activities of research return
from the unconscious in the form of compulsive brooding, naturally
in a distorted and unfree form, but sufficiently powerful to
sexualize thinking itself and to colour intellectual operations
with the pleasure and anxiety that belong to sexual processes
proper. Here investigation becomes a sexual activity, often the
exclusive one, and the feeling that comes from settling things in
one’s mind and explaining them replaces sexual satisfaction;
but the interminable character of the child’s researches is
also repeated in the fact that this brooding never ends and that
the intellectual feeling, so much desired, of having found a
solution recedes more and more into the distance.

Leonardo Da Vinci And A Memory Of His Childhood

2257

   In virtue of a special
disposition, the third type, which is the rarest and most perfect,
escapes both inhibition of thought and neurotic compulsive
thinking. It is true that here too sexual repression comes about,
but it does not succeed in relegating a component instinct of
sexual desire to the unconscious. Instead, the libido evades the
fate of repression by being sublimated from the very beginning into
curiosity and by becoming attached to the powerful instinct for
research as a reinforcement. Here, too, the research becomes to
some extent compulsive and a substitute for sexual activity; but
owing to the complete difference in the underlying psychical
processes (sublimation instead of an irruption from the unconscious
) the quality of neurosis is absent; there is no attachment to the
original complexes of infantile sexual research, and the instinct
can operate freely in the service of intellectual interest. Sexual
repression, which has made the instinct so strong through the
addition to it of sublimated libido, is still taken into account by
the instinct, in that it avoids any concern with sexual themes.

   If we reflect on the concurrence
in Leonardo of his over-powerful instinct for research and the
atrophy of his sexual life (which was restricted to what is called
ideal homosexuality) we shall be disposed to claim him as a model
instance of our third type. The core of his nature, and the secret
of it, would appear to be that after his curiosity had been
activated in infancy in the service of sexual interests he
succeeded in sublimating the greater part of his libido into an
urge for research. But it is not easy, to be sure, to prove that
this view is right. To do so we should need some picture of his
mental development in the first years of his childhood, and it
seems foolish to hope for material of that sort when the accounts
of his life are so meagre and so unreliable, and when moreover it
is a question of information about circumstances that escape the
attention of observers even in relation to people of our own
generation.

Leonardo Da Vinci And A Memory Of His Childhood

2258

   About Leonardo’s youth we
know very little. He was born in 1452 in the little town of Vinci
between Florence and Empoli; he was an illegitimate child, which in
those days was certainly not considered a grave social stigma; his
father was Ser Piero da Vinci, a notary and descended from a family
of notaries and farmers who took their name from the locality of
Vinci; his mother was a certain Caterina, probably a peasant girl,
who later married another native of Vinci. This mother does not
occur again in the history of Leonardo’s life, and it is only
Merezhkovsky - the novelist - who believes that he has succeeded in
finding some trace of her. The only definite piece of information
about Leonardo’s childhood comes in an official document of
the year 1457; it is a Florentine land-register for the purpose of
taxation, which mentions Leonardo among the members of the
household of the Vinci family as the five-year old illegitimate
child of Ser Piero.¹ The marriage of Ser Piero with a certain
Donna Albiera remained childless, and it was therefore possible for
the young Leonardo to be brought up in his father’s house. He
did not leave this house till - at what age is not known - he
entered Andrea del Verrocchio’s studio as an apprentice. In
the year 1472 Leonardo’s name was already to be found in the
list of members of the ‘
Compagnia dei Pittori
’.
That is all.

  
¹
Scognamiglio (1900, 15).

Leonardo Da Vinci And A Memory Of His Childhood

2259

II

There is, so far as I know, only one place in
his scientific note books where Leonardo inserts a piece of
information about his childhood. In a passage about the flight of
vultures he suddenly interrupts himself to pursue a memory from
very early years which had sprung to his mind:

   ‘It seems that I was always
destined to be so deeply concerned with vultures; for I recall as
one of my very earliest memories that while I was in my cradle a
vulture came down to me, and opened my mouth with its tail, and
struck me many times with its tail against my
lips.’¹

   What we have here then is a
childhood memory; and certainly one of the strangest sort. It is
strange on account of its content and on account of the age to
which it is assigned. That a person should be able to retain a
memory of his suckling period is perhaps not impossible, but it
cannot by any means be regarded as certain. What, however, this
memory of Leonardo’s asserts - namely that a vulture opened
the child’s mouth with its tail - sounds so improbable, so
fabulous, that another view of it, which at a single stroke puts an
end to both difficulties, has more to commend it to our judgement.
On this view the scene with the vulture would not be a memory of
Leonardo’s but a phantasy, which he formed at a later date
and transposed to his childhood.²

  
¹
‘Questo scriver si distintamente del
nibio par che sia mio destino, perchè nella mia prima
recordatione della mia infantia e’ mi parea che, essendo io
in culla, che un nibio venissi a me e mi aprissi la bocca colla sua
coda e molte volte mi percuotesse con tal coda dentro alle
labbra.’ (Codex Atlanticus, F. 65 v., as given by
Scognamiglio.

  
²
[
Footnote added
1919:] In a friendly
notice of this book Havelock Ellis (1910) has challenged the view
put forward above. He objects that this memory of Leonardo’s
may very well have had a basis of reality: since children’s
memories often reach very much further back than is commonly
supposed; the large bird in question need not of course have been a
vulture. This is a point that I will gladly concede, and as a step
towards lessening the difficulty I in turn will offer a suggestion
- namely that his mother observed the large bird’s visit to
her child - an event which may easily have had the significance of
an omen in her eyes - and repeatedly told him about it afterwards.
As a result, I suggest, he retained the memory of his
mother’s story, and later, as so often happens, it became
possible for him to take it for a memory of an experience of his
own. However, this alteration does no damage to the force of my
general account. It happens, indeed, as a general rule that the
phantasies about their childhood which people construct at a late
date are attached to trivial but real events of this early, and
normally forgotten, period. There must thus have been some secret
reason for bringing into prominence a real event of no importance
and for elaborating it in the sort of way Leonardo did in his story
of the bird, which he dubbed a vulture, and of its remarkable
behaviour.

Leonardo Da Vinci And A Memory Of His Childhood

2260

   This is often the way in which
childhood memories originate. Quite unlike conscious memories from
the time of maturity, they are not fixed at the moment of being
experienced and afterwards repeated, but are only elicited at a
later age when childhood is already past; in the process they are
altered and falsified, and are put into the service of later
trends, so that generally speaking they cannot be sharply
distinguished from phantasies. Their nature is perhaps best
illustrated by a comparison with the way in which the writing of
history originated among the peoples of antiquity. As long as a
nation was small and weak it gave no thought to the writing of its
history. Men tilled the soil of their land, fought for their
existence against their neighbours, and tried to gain territory
from them and to acquire wealth. It was an age of heroes, not of
historians. Then came another age, an age of reflection: men felt
themselves to be rich and powerful, and now felt a need to learn
where they had come from and how they had developed. Historical
writing, which had begun to keep a continuous record of the
present, now also cast a glance back to the past, gathered
traditions and legends, interpreted the traces of antiquity that
survived in customs and usages, and in this way created a history
of the past. It was inevitable that this early history should have
been an expression of present beliefs and wishes rather than a true
picture of the past; for many things had been dropped from the
nation’s memory, while others were distorted, and some
remains of the past were given a wrong interpretation in order to
fit in with contemporary ideas. Moreover people’s motive for
writing history was not objective curiosity but a desire to
influence their contemporaries, to encourage and inspire them, or
to hold a mirror up before them. A man’s conscious memory of
the events of his maturity is in every way comparable to the first
kind of historical writing; while the memories that he has of his
childhood correspond, as far as their origins and reliability are
concerned, to the history of a nation’s earliest days, which
was compiled later and for tendentious reasons.

Leonardo Da Vinci And A Memory Of His Childhood

2261

   If, then, Leonardo’s story
about the vulture that visited him in his cradle is only a phantasy
from a later period, one might suppose it could hardly be worth
while spending much time on it. One might be satisfied with
explaining it on the basis of his inclination, of which he makes no
secret, to regard his preoccupation with the flight of birds as
pre-ordained by destiny. Yet in underrating this story one would be
committing just as great an injustice as if one were carelessly to
reject the body of legends, traditions and interpretations found in
a nation’s early history. In spite of all the distortions and
misunderstandings, they still represent the reality of the past:
they are what a people forms out of the experience of its early
days and under the dominance of motives that were once powerful and
still operate to-day; and if it were only possible, by a knowledge
of all the forces at work, to undo these distortions, there would
be no difficulty in disclosing the historical truth lying behind
the legendary material. The same holds good for the childhood
memories or phantasies of an individual. What someone thinks he
remembers from his childhood is not a matter of indifference; as a
rule the residual memories - which he himself does not understand -
cloak priceless pieces of evidence about the most important
features in his mental development.¹ As we now possess in the
techniques of psycho-analysis excellent methods for helping us to
bring this concealed material to light, we may venture to fill in
the gap in Leonardo’s life story by analysing his childhood
phantasy. And if in doing so we remain dissatisfied with the degree
of certainty which we achieve, we shall have to console ourselves
with the reflection that so many other studies of this great and
enigmatic man have met with no better fate.

  
¹
[
Footnote added
1919:] Since I wrote
the above words I have attempted to make similar use of an
unintelligible memory dating from the childhood of another man of
genius. In the account of his life that Goethe wrote when he was
about sixty (‘
Dichtung und Warheit
’) there is a
description in the first few pages of how, with the encouragement
of his neighbours, he slung first some small and then some large
pieces of crockery out of the window into the street, so that they
were smashed to pieces. This is, indeed, the only scene that he
reports from the earliest years of childhood. The sheer
inconsequentiality of its content, the way in which it corresponded
with the childhood memories of other human beings who did not
become particularly great, and the absence in this passage of any
mention of the young brother who was born when Goethe was three and
three-quarters, and who died when he was nearly ten - all this
induced me to undertake an analysis of this childhood memory. (This
child is in fact mentioned at a later point in the book, where
Goethe dwells on the many illnesses of childhood.) I hoped to be
able as a result to replace it by something which would be more in
keeping with the context of Goethe’s account and whose
content would make it worthy of preservation and of the place he
has given it in the history of his life. The short analysis made it
possible for the throwing-out of the crockery to be recognized as a
magical act directed against a troublesome intruder; and at the
place in the book where he describes the episode the intention is
to triumph over the fact that a second son was not in the long run
permitted to disturb Goethe’s close relation with his mother.
If the earliest memory of childhood, preserved in disguises such as
these, should be concerned - in Goethe’s case as well as in
Leonardo’s - with the mother, what would be so surprising in
that?