 The German edition | |
| Author | Sigmund Freud |
|---|---|
| Original title | Eine Kindheitserinnerung des Leonardo da Vinci |
| Language | German |
| Subject | Leonardo da Vinci |
| Text | Leonardo da Vinci, A Memory of His Childhood at Wikisource |
Leonardo da Vinci and A Memory of His Childhood (German : Eine Kindheitserinnerung des Leonardo da Vinci) is a 1910 essay by Sigmund Freud about Leonardo da Vinci. It consists of a psychoanalytic study of Leonardo's life based on his paintings.
In the Codex Atlanticus Leonardo recounts being attacked as an infant in his crib by a bird. Freud cites the passage as: [1]
“It seems that it had been destined before that I should occupy myself so thoroughly with the vulture, for it comes to my mind as a very early memory, when I was still in the cradle, a vulture came down to me, he opened my mouth with his tail and struck me a few times with his tail against my lips.”
According to Freud, this was a childhood fantasy based on the memory of sucking his mother's nipple. He backed up his claim with the fact that Egyptian hieroglyphs represent the mother as a vulture, because the Egyptians believed that there are no male vultures and that the females of the species are impregnated by the wind. In most representations the vulture-headed maternal deity was formed by the Egyptians in a phallic manner, her body which was distinguished as feminine by its breasts also bore the penis in a state of erection. [2]
However, the translation "Geier" (vulture), which Maria Herzfeld had used for "nibbio" in 1904 in the first edition of her book Leonardo da Vinci, der Denker, Forscher und Poet, [3] was not exactly the kite Leonardo da Vinci had meant: a small hawk-like bird of prey, common in the Vinci area, which is occasionally a scavenger. This disappointed Freud because, as he confessed to Lou Andreas-Salomé in a letter of 9 February 1919, he regarded the Leonardo essay as "the only beautiful thing I have ever written". [4] The psychologist Erich Neumann, writing in Art and the Creative Unconscious, attempted to repair the theory by incorporating the kite.[ citation needed ]
Another theory proposed by Freud attempts to explain Leonardo's fondness of depicting the Virgin Mary with St. Anne in the picture The Virgin and Child with St. Anne . Leonardo, who was illegitimate, was raised by his blood mother initially before being "adopted" by the wife of his father Ser Piero. The idea of depicting the Mother of God with her own mother was therefore particularly close to Leonardo's heart, because he, in a sense, had 'two mothers' himself. It is worth noting that in both versions of the composition (the Louvre painting and the London cartoon) it is hard to discern whether St. Anne is a full generation older than Mary. Freud also points out that, in the painting, the outline of a vulture can be seen. This is connected to the original fantasy involving the vulture in Leonardo da Vinci's crib.
Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci, known as Leonardo da Vinci, was an Italian polymath of the Renaissance whose areas of interest included invention, drawing, painting, sculpture, architecture, science, music, mathematics, engineering, literature, anatomy, geology, astronomy, botany, paleontology, and cartography. He has been variously called the father of palaeontology, ichnology, and architecture, and is widely considered one of the greatest painters of all time.
Sigmund Freud was an Austrian neurologist and the founder of psychoanalysis, a clinical method for treating psychopathology through dialogue between a patient and a psychoanalyst.
Lou Andreas-Salomé was a Russian-born psychoanalyst and a well-traveled author, narrator, and essayist from a Russian-German family. Her diverse intellectual interests led to friendships with a broad array of distinguished Western thinkers, including Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, Paul Rée, and Rainer Maria Rilke.
The Mark Steel Lectures are a series of radio and television programmes. Written and delivered by Mark Steel, each scripted lecture presents arguments for the importance of a historical figure.
Castration anxiety is the fear of emasculation in both the literal and metaphorical sense. Castration anxiety is an overwhelming fear of damage to, or loss of, the penis—one of Sigmund Freud's earliest psychoanalytic theories. Although Freud regarded castration anxiety as a universal human experience, few empirical studies have been conducted on the topic. Much of the research that has been done on the topic was done decades ago, although still relevant today. The theory is that a child has a fear of damage being done to their genitalia by the parent of the same sex as punishment for sexual feelings toward the parent of the opposite sex. It has been theorized that castration anxiety begins between the ages of 3 and 5, otherwise known as the phallic stage of development according to Freud. Although typically associated with males, castration anxiety is theorized to be experienced in differing ways for both the male and female sexes.
In Freudian psychoanalysis, the phallic stage is the third stage of psychosexual development, spanning the ages of three to six years, wherein the infant's libido (desire) centers upon his or her genitalia as the erogenous zone. When children become aware of their bodies, the bodies of other children, and the bodies of their parents, they gratify physical curiosity by undressing and exploring each other and their genitals, the center of the phallic stage, in course of which they learn the physical differences between "male" and "female", and the gender differences between "boy" and "girl", experiences which alter the psychologic dynamics of the parent and child relationship. The phallic stage is the third of five Freudian psychosexual development stages: (i) the oral, (ii) the anal, (iii) the phallic, (iv) the latent, and (v) the genital.
In Freudian psychology, psychosexual development is a central element of the psychoanalytic sexual drive theory, that human beings, from birth, possess an instinctual libido that develops in five stages. Each stage – the oral, the anal, the phallic, the latent, and the genital – is characterized by the erogenous zone that is the source of the libidinal drive. Being unsatisfied at the particular stages can result in fixation. On the other hand, being satisfied can result in a healthy personality. Sigmund Freud proposed that if the child experienced sexual frustration in relation to any psychosexual developmental stage, they would experience anxiety that would persist into adulthood as a neurosis, a functional mental disorder.
The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne is a c. 1503 oil painting by Leonardo da Vinci depicting Saint Anne, her daughter the Virgin Mary and the infant Jesus. Christ is shown grappling with a sacrificial lamb symbolizing his Passion as the Virgin tries to restrain him. The painting was commissioned as the high altarpiece for the Church of Santissima Annunziata in Florence and its theme had long preoccupied Leonardo.
Francesco Melzi, or Francesco de Melzi, was an Italian painter born into a family of the Milanese nobility in Lombardy. He was one of Leonardo da Vinci’s pupils.
Abraham Arden Brill was an Austrian-born psychiatrist who spent almost his entire adult life in the United States. He was the first psychoanalyst to practice in the United States and the first translator of Sigmund Freud into English.
Alan Walker Tyson, was a Glasgow born British musicologist who specialized in studies of the music of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Ludwig van Beethoven. He wrote the Thematic catalogue of the works of Muzio Clementi which appeared in 1967 at Hans Schneider of Tutzing/Germany, with no following editions up to date. Tyson was Senior Research Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford, and a Fellow of the British Academy.
The personal life of Leonardo da Vinci has been a subject of interest, inquiry, and speculation since the years immediately following his death. Leonardo has long been regarded as the archetypal Renaissance man, described by the Renaissance biographer Giorgio Vasari as having qualities that "transcended nature" and being "marvellously endowed with beauty, grace and talent in abundance". Interest in and curiosity about Leonardo has continued unabated for five hundred years. Modern descriptions and analysis of Leonardo's character, personal desires and intimate behavior have been based upon various sources: records concerning him, his biographies, his own written journals, his paintings, his drawings, his associates, and commentaries that were made concerning him by contemporaries.
"The Vulture" is a short story by Franz Kafka, written sometime between 1917 and 1923.
Freud's seduction theory was a hypothesis posited in the mid-1890s by Sigmund Freud that he believed provided the solution to the problem of the origins of hysteria and obsessional neurosis. According to the theory, a repressed memory of an early childhood sexual abuse or molestation experience was the essential precondition for hysterical or obsessional symptoms, with the addition of an active sexual experience up to the age of eight for the latter.
In his model of the child's psychosexual development, Sigmund Freud describes five stages. Freud believed that the child discharges his/her libido through a distinct body area that characterizes each stage.
In Neo-Freudian psychology, the Electra complex, as proposed by Carl Jung in his Theory of Psychoanalysis, is a girl's psychosexual competition with her mother for possession of her father. In the course of her psychosexual development, the complex is the girl's phallic stage; a boy's analogous experience is the Oedipus complex. The Electra complex occurs in the third—phallic stage —of five psychosexual development stages: (i) the Oral, (ii) the Anal, (iii) the Phallic, (iv) the Latent, and (v) the Genital—in which the source of libido pleasure is in a different erogenous zone of the infant's body.
The Oedipus complex is a concept of psychoanalytic theory. Sigmund Freud introduced the concept in his Interpretation of Dreams (1899) and coined the expression in his A Special Type of Choice of Object made by Men (1910). The positive Oedipus complex refers to a child's unconscious sexual desire for the opposite-sex parent and hatred for the same-sex parent. The negative Oedipus complex refers to a child's unconscious sexual desire for the same-sex parent and hatred for the opposite-sex parent. Freud considered that the child's identification with the same-sex parent is the successful outcome of the complex and that unsuccessful outcome of the complex might lead to neurosis, pedophilia, and homosexuality.
In psychoanalysis, the primal scene is the initial witnessing by a child of a sex act, usually between the parents, that traumatizes the psychosexual development of that child. The scene witnessed may also occur between animals, and be displaced onto humans.
This is a list of writings published by Sigmund Freud. Books are either linked or in italics.
Sigmund Freud is considered to be the founder of the psychodynamic approach to psychology, which looks to unconscious drives to explain human behavior. Freud believed that the mind is responsible for both conscious and unconscious decisions that it makes on the basis of psychic drives. The id, ego, and super ego are three aspects of the mind Freud believed to comprise a person's personality. Freud believed people are "simply actors in the drama of [their] own minds, pushed by desire, pulled by coincidence. Underneath the surface, our personalities represent the power struggle going on deep within us".
