Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood (The Standard Edition) (Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud) [Paperback]

Sigmund Freud (Author), James Strachey (Editor), Peter Gay (Introduction)

Book Description

Series: Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud | Publication Date: January 17, 1990

Leonardo da Vinci (1910) remains among the most fascinating, though speculative, works of Freud's entire output.

A detailed reconstruction of Leonardo's emotional life from his earliest years, it represents Freud's first sustained venture into biography from a psychoanalytic perspective, and also his effort to trace one route that homosexual development can take.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) is one of the twentieth century's greatest minds and the founder of the psychoanalytic school of psychology. His many works include The Ego and the Id; An Outline of Psycho-Analysis; Inhibitions; Symptoms and Anxiety; New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis; Civilization and Its Discontent, and others.

Peter Gay is the author of more than twenty-five books, including the National Book Award winner The Enlightenment, the best-selling Weimar Culture, and the widely translated Freud: A Life for Our Time. He lives in New York City.

Product Details

• Paperback: 144 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company (January 17, 1990)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393001490
• ISBN-13: 978-0393001495
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 5.3 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #220,073 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Sublimation, Eros and Vultures, February 12, 2001

By 

TheIrrationalMan - See all my reviews

This review is from: Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood (The Standard Edition) (Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud) (Paperback)

Freud's attempt to apply the concepts and generalisations of psychoanalysis to the Universal Man, Leonardo da Vinci. The formulations reached in the book have now become "pop-Freudian" cliches: the subject was doted on by his mother, neglected by his father and therefore developed a homosexual streak. What occured exactly, according to Freud, was an inordinate Oedipal development in which the subject took his father's domination of the mother as a "de facto" domination (hence prohibition on the father's part) of *all* women and hence it triggered a shift from heterosexual to homosexual tendencies. Freud applies his doctrine of infantile sexuality to address other topics such as Leonardo's prodigious genius, his scientific pursuits and the fact that he left so many works unfinished. The study is speculative and tendentious and, which is more, it is marred by an egregious error in the translation of one of Leonardo's notebooks. Its major shortcoming is its rather reckless and overconfident attempt to reconstruct the psycholgy of a man dead for centuries. For zealous partisans of psychoanalysis only, or for those who have an academic interest in the subject.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A mistake or two, still great, July 5, 2008

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Ferdinando Cortese "alfredo" (Ohio, USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood (The Standard Edition) (Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud) (Paperback)

There are a couple of mistakes in this book. Freud translate "nibbio" into vulture instead of kite. He also questions Leonardo's "active" homosexuality, but this was a "well known fact" in Florence. The discussion on repression and sublimation reveals, in my opinion, some limits of his theory as these terms are hard to define. However the discussion on the two paintings, the Monna Lisa and Sant'Anna and the Madonna with the child and on some of the roots of homosexuality is great, and Freud is a great writer.

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A POSTHUMOUS "PSYCHOANALYSIS" OF LEONARDO, August 13, 2010

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Steven H. Propp (Sacramento, CA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood (The Standard Edition) (Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud) (Paperback)

Freud wrote this short work in 1910, and it was one of the earliest attempts to apply the techniques of psycho-analysis to figures of the past. Here are some representative quotations from the book:

"Observation of men's daily lives shows us that most people succeed in directing very considerable portions of their sexual instinctual forces to their professional activity. The sexual instinct is particularly well fitted to make contributions of this kind since it is endowed with a capacity for sublimation."
"Under the influence of this threat of castration (the boy) now sees the notion he has gained of the female genitals in a new light; henceforth he will tremble for his masculinity, but at the same time he will despise the unhappy creatures on whom the cruel punishment has, as he supposes, already fallen."
"Biologically speaking, religiousness is to be traced to the small human child's long drawn-out helplessness and need of help; and when at a later date he perceives how truly forlorn and weak he is when confronted with the great forces of life, he feels his own condition as he did in childhood, and attempts to deny his own despondency by a regressive revival of the forces which protected his infancy."