Leonardo's Kite
This brief analysis of analysis takes its title by the recollection of a childhood incident by Leonardo Da Vinci that Freud appropriated as part of his discussion of the role of infantile fantasy within art. Whilst in his cradle Leonardo saw a large bird which flew close and opened the child’s mouth with its tail, striking him many times against the lips in the process. Leonardo had been an illegitimate child whose father and mother had married other people in the year that he was born, he was soon adopted into his father’s household alongside this his homosexual inclinations are also well recorded. From these materials Freud was quick to expose the latent homosexuality seeing in the bird’s tail an image of the penis and linking the pleasure of suckling the breast to the sucking of the penis. He then uses Egyptian mythological evidence to link the vulture to the mother on an archetypal or resonant level, for in Egyptian myth vultures were seen as being only female and in their relationship to death they were a perfect match for a boy without a mother. Unfortunately Freud’s clever link had been already broken by the fact that its entire value lay on the basis of a mistranslation, Freud had read vulture, and Leonardo had seen a kite!
This rather unfortunate accident, or parapraxis even (the famous freudian slip) illustrates a number of important points about Freud’s incipient wish to reduce art (as with dreams and neurotic material) to repressed infantile sexuality…for one his actual knowledge of the facts was often overlooked, famously in the example of the paranoid Judge Schreber and within literature in his analysis of Dostoevsky. In both these examples it is Freud’s knowledge of the father relationship that is misconstrued, with Schreber he interpreted Schreiber’s desire to become a woman in order to be impregnated by the fecundity of divine rays as latent homosexual leanings for his doctor, with its origins in the positive transference of the paternal relationship. Schreiber’s father had actually been a tyrant who had forcefully restricted his boys onto back straightening equipment and gave them enemas to prevent nocturnal emissions. The eldest boy shot himself at 38 and Schreber never recovered from his second breakdown at 51. In Dostoevsky’s case he had it the other way round, whilst Freud saw a tyrant father who had induced mock epilepsy in his masochistically guilty son, Doctor Dostoevsky was an encouraging educator and Dostoevsky almost certainly really had epilepsy. It is to easy to turn Freud’s methodology onto himself, it is also thanks to Freud that we even can, but it is evident that the shadow of the father confuses some of Freud’s analysis of clients and of art.
What if Leonardo’s kite was a sign, a living symbol an omen of his own flights of inventive fantasy that became so much more than a flight from the reality principle and actually began even in flight, to change the way we experience that reality…? Freud was not convinced that Leonardo had even seen the bird; he believed it was a fantasy recollection, I ask, does this even matter? At that age, with that kind of image how does one ever see it? Through dream, half-dream, intuition, something of Leonardo’s daimon is present in the image of a bird opening his mouth with its tail – could this not be as much an invitation from the imaginal, to speak? Many great souls in many cultures arrival is marked by a bird or other power animal, is this not another messenger of this order? Who can say for sure, but it is a point of view no less far fetched that Freud’s tracing of the mythological origins of the vulture (why Egypt for Leonardo for example?). From this point of view Schreber’s vision is less than a paranoid concealment of his previously inactive desire to become homosexual and is instead a symbolic form of his own need to return to the repressed – in becoming a woman he could be vulnerable, open and admit the insecurity and impotency from his father and allow himself to experience the nature of love, coming down from the divine like the rays of the sun.
When we contemplate the different perspectives of analysis or interpretation we come across the essential importance of our choice of fiction, of which story we hold to. In this sense the observer always infiltrates the observed and Freud’s idea that he remained a scientist (of the old school detached kind), recorded (along with the biographical material that makes the bulk of this essay) in Anthony Storr’s wonderful Freud: a very short introduction (OUP 1989), just another fantasy. Storr regards Freud as more of an historian, garnering a perspective from the analysis of the past, a perspective that could never hope to be complete. In this sense we are all historians, just as we are myth makers and storytellers, we are all involved in the selection process, conscious and unconscious, of which stories we give credence to, and therefore which possible realities from the multitude (probably infinite) available to us we decide to live out, and to live through. In this way we choose whether the bird that visits us in the cradle is yet another embodiment of our neurosis or whether such a visitation as something of value within it, that it is a gift…We may need at times to hold both points of view together…but let us not hold to our reductionism and say that it is somehow more logical or rational to see it this way rather than that way…let us admit (with Keats) that the aesthetic element of truth is just as, if not more, valid.
Mark Jones
This rather unfortunate accident, or parapraxis even (the famous freudian slip) illustrates a number of important points about Freud’s incipient wish to reduce art (as with dreams and neurotic material) to repressed infantile sexuality…for one his actual knowledge of the facts was often overlooked, famously in the example of the paranoid Judge Schreber and within literature in his analysis of Dostoevsky. In both these examples it is Freud’s knowledge of the father relationship that is misconstrued, with Schreber he interpreted Schreiber’s desire to become a woman in order to be impregnated by the fecundity of divine rays as latent homosexual leanings for his doctor, with its origins in the positive transference of the paternal relationship. Schreiber’s father had actually been a tyrant who had forcefully restricted his boys onto back straightening equipment and gave them enemas to prevent nocturnal emissions. The eldest boy shot himself at 38 and Schreber never recovered from his second breakdown at 51. In Dostoevsky’s case he had it the other way round, whilst Freud saw a tyrant father who had induced mock epilepsy in his masochistically guilty son, Doctor Dostoevsky was an encouraging educator and Dostoevsky almost certainly really had epilepsy. It is to easy to turn Freud’s methodology onto himself, it is also thanks to Freud that we even can, but it is evident that the shadow of the father confuses some of Freud’s analysis of clients and of art.
What if Leonardo’s kite was a sign, a living symbol an omen of his own flights of inventive fantasy that became so much more than a flight from the reality principle and actually began even in flight, to change the way we experience that reality…? Freud was not convinced that Leonardo had even seen the bird; he believed it was a fantasy recollection, I ask, does this even matter? At that age, with that kind of image how does one ever see it? Through dream, half-dream, intuition, something of Leonardo’s daimon is present in the image of a bird opening his mouth with its tail – could this not be as much an invitation from the imaginal, to speak? Many great souls in many cultures arrival is marked by a bird or other power animal, is this not another messenger of this order? Who can say for sure, but it is a point of view no less far fetched that Freud’s tracing of the mythological origins of the vulture (why Egypt for Leonardo for example?). From this point of view Schreber’s vision is less than a paranoid concealment of his previously inactive desire to become homosexual and is instead a symbolic form of his own need to return to the repressed – in becoming a woman he could be vulnerable, open and admit the insecurity and impotency from his father and allow himself to experience the nature of love, coming down from the divine like the rays of the sun.
When we contemplate the different perspectives of analysis or interpretation we come across the essential importance of our choice of fiction, of which story we hold to. In this sense the observer always infiltrates the observed and Freud’s idea that he remained a scientist (of the old school detached kind), recorded (along with the biographical material that makes the bulk of this essay) in Anthony Storr’s wonderful Freud: a very short introduction (OUP 1989), just another fantasy. Storr regards Freud as more of an historian, garnering a perspective from the analysis of the past, a perspective that could never hope to be complete. In this sense we are all historians, just as we are myth makers and storytellers, we are all involved in the selection process, conscious and unconscious, of which stories we give credence to, and therefore which possible realities from the multitude (probably infinite) available to us we decide to live out, and to live through. In this way we choose whether the bird that visits us in the cradle is yet another embodiment of our neurosis or whether such a visitation as something of value within it, that it is a gift…We may need at times to hold both points of view together…but let us not hold to our reductionism and say that it is somehow more logical or rational to see it this way rather than that way…let us admit (with Keats) that the aesthetic element of truth is just as, if not more, valid.
Mark Jones
IMAGES: Vulture (2006) by Christine L. Reyes. Available from the artist, page from Chiaroscuro: The Private Lives of Leonardo da Vinci #10 (1996: DC Comics) by David Rawson/Pat MacGreal/Chas Truog/Rafael Kayanan/Carla Feeny
posted by Yourmindfire at Tuesday, July 11, 2006
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