Freud - Complete Works (390 page)

Leonardo Da Vinci And A Memory Of His Childhood

2267

   If it is true that the
unintelligible memories of a person’s childhood and the
phantasies that are built on them invariably emphasize the most
important elements in his mental development, then it follows that
the fact which the vulture phantasy confirms, namely that Leonardo
spent the first years of his life alone with his mother, will have
been of decisive influence in the formation of his inner life. An
inevitable effect of this state of affairs was that the child - who
was confronted in his early life with one problem more than other
children - began to brood on this riddle with special intensity,
and so at a tender age became a researcher, tormented as he was by
the great question of where babies come from and what the father
has to do with their origin. It was a vague suspicion that his
researches and the history of his childhood were connected in this
way which later prompted him to exclaim that he had been destined
from the first to investigate the problem of the flight of birds
since he had been visited by a vulture as he lay in his cradle.
Later on it will not be difficult to show how his curiosity about
the flight of birds was derived from the sexual researches of his
childhood.

Leonardo Da Vinci And A Memory Of His Childhood

2268

III

In Leonardo’s childhood phantasy we have
taken the element of the vulture to represent the real content of
his memory, while the context in which Leonardo himself placed his
phantasy his thrown a bright light on the importance which that
content had for his later life. In proceeding with our work of
interpretation we now come up against the strange problem of why
this content has been recast into a homosexual situation. The
mother who suckles her child - or to put it better, at whose breast
the child sucks - has been turned into a vulture that puts its tail
into the child’s mouth. We have asserted that, according to
the usual way in which language makes use of substitutes, the
vulture’s ‘
coda
’ cannot possibly signify
anything other than a male genital, a penis. But we do not
understand how imaginative activity can have succeeded in endowing
precisely this bird which is a mother with the distinguishing mark
of masculinity; and in view of this absurdity we are at a loss how
to reduce this creation of Leonardo’s phantasy to any
rational meaning.

   However, we should not despair,
as we reflect on the number of apparently absurd dreams that we
have in the past compelled to give up their meaning. Is there any
reason why a memory of childhood should offer us more difficulty
than a dream?

   Remembering that it is
unsatisfactory when a peculiar feature is found singly, let us
hasten to add another to it which is even more striking.

   The vulture-headed Egyptian
goddess Mut, a figure without any personal character according to
Drexler’s article in Roscher’s lexicon, was often
merged with other mother goddesses of a more strongly marked
individuality, like Isis and Hathor, but at the same time she
maintained her separate existence and cult. A special feature of
the Egyptian pantheon was that the individual gods did not
disappear in the process of syncretization. Alongside the fusion of
gods the individual divinities continued to exist in independence.
Now this vulture-headed mother goddess was usually represented by
the Egyptians with a phallus;¹ her body was female, as the
breasts indicated, but it also had a male organ in a state of
erection.

  
¹
See the illustrations in Lanzone (1882,
Plates CXXXVI - CXXXXVIII).

Leonardo Da Vinci And A Memory Of His Childhood

2269

   In the goddess Mut, then, we find
the same combination of maternal and masculine characteristics as
in Leonardo’s phantasy of the vulture. Are we to explain this
coincidence by assuming that from studying his books Leonardo had
also learnt of the androgynous nature of the maternal vulture? Such
a possibility is more than questionable; it appears that the
sources to which he had access contained no information about this
remarkable feature. It is more plausible to trace the
correspondence back to a common factor operative in both cases but
still unknown.

   Mythology can teach us that an
androgynous structure, a combination of male and female sex
characters, was an attribute not only of Mut but also of other
deities like Isis and Hathor - though perhaps of these only in so
far as they too had a maternal nature and became amalgamated with
Mut (Römer, 1903). It teaches us further that other Egyptian
deities, like Neith of Sais - from whom the Greek Athene was later
derived - were originally conceived of as androgynous, i.e. as
hermaphrodite, and that the same was true of many of the
Greek
gods, especially of those associated with Dionysus,
but also of Aphrodite, who was later restricted to the role of a
female goddess of love. Mythology may then offer the explanation
that the addition of a phallus to the female body is intended to
denote the primal creative force of nature, and that all these
hermaphrodite divinities are expressions of the idea that only a
combination of male and female elements can give a worthy
representation of divine perfection. But none of these
considerations gives us an explanation of the puzzling
psychological fact that the human imagination does not boggle at
endowing a figure which is intended to embody the essence of the
mother with the mark of male potency which is the opposite of
everything maternal.

Leonardo Da Vinci And A Memory Of His Childhood

2270

   Infantile sexual theories provide
the explanation. There was once a time when the male genital was
found compatible with the picture of the mother. When a male child
first turns his curiosity to the riddles of sexual life, he is
dominated by his interest in his own genital. He finds that part of
his body too valuable and too important for him to be able to
believe that it could be missing in other people whom he feels he
resembles so much. As he cannot guess that there exists another
type of genital structure of equal worth, he is forced to make the
assumption that all human beings, women as well as men, possess a
penis like his own. This preconception is so firmly planted in the
youthful investigator that it is not destroyed even when he first
observes the genitals of little girls. His perception tells him, it
is true, that there is something different from what there is in
him, but he is incapable of admitting to himself that the content
of this perception is that he cannot find a penis in girls. That
the penis could be missing strikes him as an uncanny and
intolerable idea, and so in an attempt at a compromise he comes to
the conclusion that little girls have a penis as well, only it is
still very small; it will grow later.¹ If it seems from later
observations that this expectation is not realized, he has another
remedy at his disposal: little girls too had a penis, but it was
cut off and in its place was left a wound. This theoretical advance
already makes use of personal experiences of a distressing kind:
the boy in the meantime has heard the threat that the organ which
is so dear to him will be taken away from him if he shows his
interest in it too plainly. Under the influence of this threat of
castration he now sees the notion he has gained of the female
genitals in a new light; henceforth he will tremble for his
masculinity, but at the same time he will despise the unhappy
creatures on whom the cruel punishment has, as he supposes, already
fallen.²

  
¹
Compare the observations in the
Jahrbuch
für psychoanalytische und psychopathologische Forschungen
[
added
1919:], in the
Internationale Zeitschrift für
ärtzliche Psychoanalyse
and in
Imago
.

  
²
[
Footnote added
1919:] The
conclusion strikes me as inescapable that here we may also trace
one of the roots of the anti-semitism which appears with such
elemental force and finds such irrational expression among the
nations of the West. Circumcision is unconsciously equated with
castration. If we venture to carry our conjectures back to the
primaeval days of the human race we can surmise that originally
circumcision must have been a milder substitute, designed to take
the place of castration.

Leonardo Da Vinci And A Memory Of His Childhood

2271

   Before the child comes under the
dominance of the castration-complex - at a time when he still holds
women at full value - he begins to display an intense desire to
look, as an erotic instinctual activity. He wants to see other
people’s genitals, at first in all probability to compare
them with his own. The erotic attraction that comes from his mother
soon culminates in a longing for her genital organ, which he takes
to be a penis. With the discovery, which is not made till later,
that women do not have a penis, this longing often turns into its
opposite and gives place to a feeling of disgust which in the years
of puberty can become the cause of psychical impotence, misogyny
and permanent homosexuality. But the fixation on the object that
was once strongly desired, the woman’s penis, leaves
indelible traces on the mental life of the child, who has pursued
that portion of his infantile sexual researches with particular
thoroughness. Fetishistic reverence for a woman’s foot and
shoe appears to take the foot merely as a substitutive symbol for
the woman’s penis which was once revered and later missed;
without knowing it, ‘
coupeurs de nattes
’¹
play the part of people who carry out an act of castration on the
female genital organ.

   People will not reach a proper
understanding of the activities of children’s sexuality and
will probably take refuge in declaring that what has been said here
is incredible, so long as they cling to the attitude taken up by
our civilization of depreciating the genitals and the sexual
functions. To understand the mental life of children we require
analogies from primitive times. Through a long series of
generations the genitals have been for us the
‘
pudenda
’, objects of shame, and even (as a
result of further successful sexual repression) of disgust. If one
makes a broad survey of the sexual life of our time and in
particular of the classes who sustain human civilization, one is
tempted to declare that it is only with reluctance that the
majority of those alive to-day obey the command to propagate their
kind; they feel that their dignity as human beings suffers and is
degraded in the process. What is to be found among us in the way of
another view of sexual life is confined to the uncultivated lower
strata of society; among the higher and more refined classes it is
concealed, since it is considered culturally inferior, and it
ventures to put itself into practice only in the face of a bad
conscience. In the primaeval days of the human race it was a
different story. The laborious compilations of the student of
civilization provide convincing evidence that originally the
genitals were the pride and hope of living beings; they were
worshipped as gods and transmitted the divine nature of their
functions to all newly learned human activities. As a result of the
sublimation of their basic nature there arose innumerable
divinities; and at the time when the connection between official
religions and sexual activity was already hidden from the general
consciousness, secret cults devoted themselves to keeping it alive
among a number of initiates. In the course of cultural development
so much of the divine and sacred was ultimately extracted from
sexuality that the exhausted remnant fell into contempt. But in
view of the indelibility that is characteristic of all mental
traces, it is surely not surprising that even the most primitive
forms of genital-worship can be shown to have existed in very
recent times and that the language, customs and superstitions of
mankind to-day contain survivals from every phase of this process
of development.²

  
¹
[Perverts who enjoy cutting off
females’ hair.]

  
²
Cf. Knight.

Leonardo Da Vinci And A Memory Of His Childhood

2272

  Impressive analogies from biology have
prepared us to find that the individual’s mental development
repeats the course of human development in an abbreviated form; and
the conclusions which psycho-analytic research into the
child’s mind has reached concerning the high value set on the
genitals in infancy will not therefore strike us as improbable. The
child’s assumption that his mother has a penis is thus the
common source from which are derived the androgynously-formed
mother goddesses such as the Egyptian Mut and the vultures’
‘
coda
’ in Leonardo’s childhood phantasy.
It is in fact only due to a misunderstanding that we describe these
representations of gods as hermaphrodite in the medical sense of
the word. In none of them is there a combination of the true
genitals of both sexes - a combination which, to the abhorrence of
all beholders, is found in some cases of malformation; all that has
happened is that the male organ has been added to the breasts which
are the mark of a mother, just as it was present in the
child’s first idea of his mother’s body. This form of
the mother’s body, the revered creation of primaeval
phantasy, has been preserved for the faithful by mythology. We can
now provide the following translation of the emphasis given to the
vulture’s tail in Leonardo’s phantasy: ‘That was
a time when my fond curiosity was directed to my mother, and when I
still believed she had a genital organ like my own.’ Here is
more evidence of Leonardo’s early sexual researches, which in
our opinion had a decisive effect on the whole of his later
life.