Freud - Complete Works (391 page)

Leonardo Da Vinci And A Memory Of His Childhood

2273

   At this point a little reflection
will remind us that we ought not to feel satisfied yet with the way
the vulture’s tail in Leonardo’s childhood phantasy has
been explained. Something more seems to be contained in it which we
do not yet understand. Its most striking feature, after all, was
that it changed sucking at the mother’s breast into being
suckled, that is, into passivity, and thus into a situation whose
nature is undoubtedly homosexual. When we remember the historical
probability of Leonardo having behaved in his life as one who was
emotionally homosexual, the question is forced upon us whether this
phantasy does not indicate the existence of a causal connection
between Leonardo’s relation with his mother in childhood and
his later manifest, if ideal, homosexuality. We should not venture
to infer a connection of this sort from Leonardo’s distorted
reminiscence if we did not know from the psycho-analytic study of
homosexual patients that such a connection does exist and is in
fact an intimate and necessary one.

   Homosexual men, who have in our
times taken vigorous action against the restrictions imposed by law
on their sexual activity, are fond of representing themselves,
through their theoretical spokesmen, as being from the outset a
distinct sexual species, as an intermediate sexual stage, as a
‘third sex’. They are, they claim, men who are innately
compelled by organic determinants to find pleasure in men and have
been debarred from obtaining it in women. Much as one would be glad
on grounds of humanity to endorse their claims, one must treat
their theories with some reserve, for they have been advanced
without regard for the psychical genesis of homosexuality.
Psycho-analysis offers the means of filling this gap and of putting
the assertions of homosexuals to the test. It has succeeded in the
task only in the case of a small number of persons, but all the
investigations undertaken so far have yielded the same surprising
result.¹ In all our male homosexual cases the subjects had had
a very intense erotic attachment to a female person, as a rule
their mother, during the first period of childhood, which is
afterwards forgotten; this attachment was evoked or encouraged by
too much tenderness on the part of the mother herself, and further
reinforced by the small part played by the father during their
childhood. Sadger emphasizes the fact that the mothers of his
homosexual patients were frequently masculine women, women with
energetic traits of character, who were able to push the father out
of his proper place. I have occasionally seen the same thing, but I
was more strongly impressed by cases in which the father was absent
from the beginning or left the scene at an early date, so that the
boy found himself left entirely under feminine influence. Indeed it
almost seems as though the presence of a strong father would ensure
that the son made the correct decision in his choice of object,
namely someone of the opposite sex.²

  
¹
I refer in particular to the investigations
of I. Sadger, which I can in the main confirm from my own
experience. I am also aware that Wilhelm Stekel of Vienna and
Sándor Ferenczi of Budapest have arrived at the same
results.

  
²
[
Footnote added
1919:]
Psycho-analytic research has contributed two facts that are beyond
question to the understanding of homosexuality, without at the same
time supposing that it has exhausted the causes of this sexual
aberration. The first is the fixation of the erotic needs on the
mother which has been mentioned above; the other is contained in
the statement that everyone, even the most normal person, is
capable of making a homosexual object-choice, and has done so at
some time in his life, and either still adheres to it in his
unconscious or else protects himself against it by vigorous
counter-attitudes. These two discoveries put an end both to the
claim of homosexuals to be regarded as a ‘third sex’
and to what has been believed to be the important distinction
between innate and acquired homosexuality. The presence of somatic
characters of the other sex (the quota provided by physical
hermaphroditism) is highly conducive to the homosexual
object-choice becoming manifest; but it is not decisive. It must be
stated with regret that those who speak for the homosexuals in the
field of science have been incapable of learning anything from the
established findings of psycho-analysis.

Leonardo Da Vinci And A Memory Of His Childhood

2274

   After this preliminary stage a
transformation sets in whose mechanism is known to us but whose
motive forces we do not yet understand. The child’s love for
his mother cannot continue to develop consciously any further; it
succumbs to repression. The boy represses his love for his mother:
he puts himself in her place, identifies himself with her, and
takes his own person as a model in whose likeness he chooses the
new objects of his love. In this way he has become a homosexual.
What he has in fact done is to slip back to auto-erotism: for the
boys whom he now loves as he grows up are after all only
substitutive figures and revivals of himself in childhood - boys
whom he loves in the way in which his mother loved
him
when
he was a child. He finds the objects of his love along the path of
narcissism
, as we say; for Narcissus, according to the Greek
legend, was a youth who preferred his own reflection to everything
else and who was changed into the lovely flower of that name.

   Psychological considerations of a
deeper kind justify the assertion that a man who has become a
homosexual in this way remains unconsciously fixated to the mnemic
image of his mother. By repressing his love for his mother he
preserves it in his unconscious and from now on remains faithful to
her. While he seems to pursue boys and to be their lover, he is in
reality running away from the other women, who might cause him to
be unfaithful. In individual cases direct observation has also
enabled us to show that the man who gives the appearance of being
susceptible only to the charms of men is in fact attracted by women
in the same way as a normal man; but on each occasion he hastens to
transfer the excitation he has received from women on to a male
object, and in this manner he repeats over and over again the
mechanism by which he acquired his homosexuality.

Leonardo Da Vinci And A Memory Of His Childhood

2275

   We are far from wishing to
exaggerate the importance of these explanations of the psychical
genesis of homosexuality. It is quite obvious that they are in
sharp contrast to the official theories of those who speak for
homosexuals, but we know that they are not sufficiently
comprehensive to make a conclusive explanation of the problem
possible. What is for practical reasons called homosexuality may
arise from a whole variety of psychosexual inhibitory processes;
the particular process we have singled out is perhaps only one
among many, and is perhaps related to only one type of
‘homosexuality’. We must also admit that the number of
cases of our homosexual type in which it is possible to point to
the determinants which we require far exceeds the number of those
where the deduced effect actually, takes place; We should not have
had any cause at all for entering into the psychical genesis of the
form of homosexuality we have studied if there were not a strong
presumption that Leonardo, whose phantasy of the vulture was our
starting point, was himself a homosexual of this very type.

   Few details are known about the
sexual behaviour of the great artist and scientist, but we may
place confidence in the probability that the assertions of his
contemporaries were not grossly erroneous. In the light of these
traditions, then, he appears as a man whose sexual need and
activity were exceptionally reduced, as if a higher aspiration had
raised him above the common animal need of mankind. It may remain
open to doubt whether he ever sought direct sexual satisfaction -
and if so, in what manner - or whether he was able to dispense with
it altogether. We are however justified in looking in him too for
the emotional currents which drive other men imperatively on to
perform the sexual act; for we cannot imagine the mental life of
any human being in the formation of which sexual desire in the
broadest sense - libido - did not have its share, even if that
desire has departed far from its original aim, or has refrained
from putting itself into effect.

Leonardo Da Vinci And A Memory Of His Childhood

2276

   We cannot expect to find in
Leonardo anything more than
traces
of untransformed sexual
inclination. But these point in one direction and moreover allow
him to be reckoned as a homosexual. It has always been emphasized
that he took only strikingly handsome boys and youths as pupils. He
treated them with kindness and consideration, looked after them,
and when they were ill nursed them himself, just as a mother nurses
her children and just as his own mother might have tended him. As
he had chosen them for their beauty and not for their talent, none
of them - Cesare da Sesto, Boltraffio, Andrea Salaino, Francesco
Melzi and others - became a painter of importance. Generally they
were unable to make themselves independent of their master, and
after his death they disappeared without having left any definite
mark on the history of art. The others, whose works entitled them
to be called his pupils, like Luini and Bazi, called Sodoma, he
probably did not know personally.

   We realize that we shall have to
meet the objection that Leonardo’s behaviour towards his
pupils has nothing at all to do with sexual motives and that it
allows no conclusions to be drawn about his particular sexual
inclination. Against this we wish to submit with all caution that
our view explains some peculiar features of the artist’s
behaviour which would otherwise have to remain a mystery. Leonardo
kept a diary; he made entries in his small hand (written from right
to left) which were meant only for himself. It is noteworthy that
in this diary he addressed himself in the second person.
‘Learn the multiplication of roots from Master Luca.’
(Solmi, 1908, 152). ‘Get Master d’Abacco to show you
how to square the circle.’ (Loc. cit.) Or on the occasion of
a journey: ‘I am going to Milan on business to do with my
garden . . . Have two baggage trunks made. Get
Boltraffio to show you the turning-lathe and get him to polish a
stone on it. Leave the book for Master Andrea il Todesco.’
(Ibid., 203.)¹ Or a resolution of very different importance:
‘You have to show in your treatise that the earth is a star,
like the moon or something like it, and thus prove the nobility of
our world.’ (Herzfeld, 1906, 141.)

  
¹
Leonardo is behaving here like someone
whose habit it was to make his daily confession to another person
and who uses his diary as a substitute for him. For a conjecture as
to who this person may have been, see Merezhkovsky (1903,
367).

Leonardo Da Vinci And A Memory Of His Childhood

2277

   In this diary, which, by the way,
like the diaries of other mortals, often dismisses the most
important events of the day in a few words or else passes them over
in complete silence, there are some entries which on account of
their strangeness are quoted by all Leonardo’s biographers.
They are notes of small sums of money spent by the artist - notes
recorded with a minute exactness, as if they were made by a
pedantically strict and parsimonious head of a household. There is
on the other hand no record of the expenditure of larger sums or
any other evidence that the artist was at home in keeping accounts.
One of these notes has to do with a new cloak which he bought for
his pupil Andrea Salaino:¹

               
Silver
brocade     .     .     .     .     15 
lire    4 soldi

               
Crimson velvet for trimming   .   9 
lire    - soldi

               
Braid              .     .     .     .    
   .      - 
lire    9 soldi

               
Buttons          .     .     .     .     .
       -  lire   12
soldi

   Another very detailed note brings
together all the expenses he incurred through the bad character and
thievish habits of another pupil:² ‘On the twenty-first
day of April, 1490, I began this book and made a new start on the
horse.³ Jacomo came to me on St. Mary Magdalen’s day,
1490: he is ten years old.’ (Marginal note: ‘thievish,
untruthful, selfish, greedy.’) ‘On the second day I had
two shirts cut out for him, a pair of trousers and a jacket, and
when I put the money aside to pay for these things, he stole the
money from my purse, and it was never possible to make him own up,
although I was absolutely sure of it.’ (Marginal note:
‘4 lire . . .’) The report of the
child’s misdeeds runs on in this way and ends with the
reckoning of expenses: ‘In the first year, a cloak, 2 lire; 6
shirts, 4 lire; 3 jackets, 6 lire; 4 pairs of stockings, 7 lire;
etc.’
⁴

  
¹
The text is that given by Merezhkovsky
(1903, 282).

  
²
Or model.

  
³
For the equestrian statue of Francesco
Sforza.

  
⁴
The
full text is to be found in Herzfeld (1906, 45).