Leonardo da Vinci: A Memory of Childhood

Author: Freud
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-05-01
Features: However, no matter how the actual circumstances of Leonardo's life may be, we cannot give up our efforts to conduct a psychoanalysis of him until we achieve success in other issues. We must define the scope of psychoanalysis in biographies as a whole; otherwise, any phenomenon that is not explained will be considered a failure. The data of psychoanalysis comes from a person's life experience: on one hand, the accidental factors of events and the influence of the environment, and on the other hand, the individual's reactions after being reported. Based on the understanding of psychological mechanisms, we actively study the nature of the individual from his reactions, discover his original psychological motivations, as well as his later transformation and development. If we achieve this and take into account the character and fate of this individual, as well as the interaction of internal and external forces, then we can explain the lifestyle of this person. If this still does not yield any definite results—perhaps like the case of Leonardo—then the responsibility does not lie in the errors or imperfect methods of psychoanalysis, but in the inaccuracy and incompleteness of the information about this person that has been passed down. Therefore, it is the biographers who are to blame for this failure, as they forced psychoanalysis to make such a judgment on such insufficient material. However, even if we have very rich historical data and are confident in the application of psychological mechanisms—which are considered two important points in psychoanalysis—psychoanalytic research cannot explain clearly why a person necessarily becomes this way rather than that way. In the case of Leonardo, we are forced to adopt the view that theness of his illegitimate birth and his mother's excessive tenderness had a decisive influence on the formation of his character and his later fate: the sexual repression that emerged after childhood led him to sublimate his libido into a desire for knowledge, and made his sexual life remain stagnant for the rest of his life. But it is not the case that sexual satisfaction in childhood always leads to such repression. In other people, perhaps such repression does not occur, or it occurs only to a very small extent. We must acknowledge that there is a degree of freedom that cannot be resolved using psychoanalytic methods. Similarly, people cannot regard the result of this repression as the only possible outcome. Perhaps another person did not successfully sublimate the repressed libido into a desire for knowledge. He was influenced in the same way as Leonardo but had to endure permanent intellectual defects and an inescapable tendency toward obsessive mental illness. Psychoanalytic methods cannot explain two characteristics of Leonardo: his extremely particular tendency toward repressive sexual desire and his remarkable ability to sublimate primal desire. The transformation of sexual desire is the last issue that psychoanalysis can address. Subsequent issues are completed by biological research. We must seek the causes of the tendency toward repression and the ability to sublate in the physiological basis of character formation, because the psychological structure is produced later based on the physiological structure. Since artistic talent and ability are closely related to sublimation, we must acknowledge that the essence of artistic achievement is also something that we cannot understand through psychoanalysis.