A lecture of Freud on Leonardo da Vinci

Journal title PSICOTERAPIA E SCIENZE UMANE
Author/s Cesare Romano
Publishing Year 2024 Issue 2024/1 Language Italian
Pages 16 P. 81-96 File size 89 KB
DOI 10.3280/PU2024-001005
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Freud’s lecture given on December 1, 1909, at the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society on Leonardo da Vinci is examined. This lecture is a forerunner of his later article Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of his Childhood (Freud, 1910b). An attempt is made to emphasize the inconsistency between Freud’s hypotheses and the historical data by then at his disposal. Avoiding entering Freud’s vulture slip that many scholars have pointed out and Freud never acknowledged, con-cerns are expressed about Freud’s required documentation in the field of art history and about the method he employed for the portrayal of Leonardo da Vinci’s personality. It seems that Freud willingly avoided historical data choosing almost entirely to rely on applied psychoanalysis wide-ly employing his own phantasies in attempting to overcome the paucity of knowledge on Leonar-do da Vinci’s childhood. Freud himself later acknowledged that his 1910 paper was partly a fic-tional story along the lines of Mereskovskij’s 1895 book on Leonardo. A crucial inconsistency of this lecture, that will not be amended in his paper of 1910, relates to the fact that Freud changed into a phantasy what Leonardo had reported as a childhood memory. Many scholars have taken for granted this shift so that they talked about Leonardo’s “phantasy” or “dream”.

Keywords: Freud; Leonardo da Vinci; Phantasy; Psychobiography; Applied psychoanalysis

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  • Intervento. Le patografie di Freud tra cultura e metodo scientifico. Alcune osservazioni sui temi sollevati da Cesare Romano Andrea Angelozzi, in PSICOTERAPIA E SCIENZE UMANE 1/2024 pp.97
    DOI: 10.3280/PU2024-001006

Cesare Romano, Una conferenza di Freud su Leonardo da Vinci in "PSICOTERAPIA E SCIENZE UMANE" 1/2024, pp 81-96, DOI: 10.3280/PU2024-001005