Starting from a critical reading of Freud’s essay A Childhood Memory of Leonardo da Vinci, the author tries to assess whether it is still valuable. The historical debate between Schapiro and Eissler as well as to the more recent work of Maïdani Gerard and Collins is discussed. It appears that the central element of Freud’s psychobiographical contribution, i.e., the interpretation of Leonardo’s affective indifference and his inhibition in his artistic creation by his latent homosexuality, has found more support in recent biographical and iconographical research. More specifically, it is argued that Freud’s intuitions, both with respect to the circumstances of Leonardo’s early childhood, and to the uniqueness of his St. Anne with Two Others, have finally been accepted.
Search
Latest articles
- “I don’t stop; I start again.” The position of the analyst in ‘long term care’By Glenn Strubbe
- Vampires, Viruses and Verbalisation: Bram Stoker’s Dracula as a genealogical window into fin-de-sièc…By Hub Zwart
- Psychoanalysis: a symptomatic problemBy Evi Verbeke
- The Violence of Right: Rereading ‘Why War?’By Jens De Vleminck
Keywords
Addiction
Aggression
Applied psychoanalysis
Architecture
Art
Body
Case study
Collecting
Death
death drive
desire
ethics
Fantasy
Freud
Gaze
Hysteria
Institution
Institutional Psychotherapy
interpretation
Jacques Lacan
Jouissance
Lacan
Language
Literature
Memory
Narcissism
Object a
Oedipus
Outsider Art
psychoanalyse
Psychoanalysis
Psychose
Psychosis
Real
Repetition
Repression
Sade
Signifier
Subject
Sublimation
Transference
Trauma
Unconscious
Violence
Writing