Freud's Psychohistory of Leonardo da Vinci

Freud's Psychohistory of Leonardo da Vinci: A Matter of Being Right or Left Freud's Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of his Childhood has become a classic because it marked the beginning of an entirely new approach to the study of personality and set in motion a new trend of investigation which has proved to be very productive. Freud's psychoanalytic interpretation of the personality of Leonardo aroused a great deal of interest, as well as violent criticism, because the deductive procedures involved in the analysis were novel and its conclusions daring. In order to support his controversial interpretation, Freud relied heavily on three sources of information: Leonardo's recollection of a childhood fantasy about a vulture, the nature and composition of his paintings, and slips and errors found in his writings. Viewed from a psychoanalytic perspective, these phenomena inevitably led Freud to conclude that Leonardo had the characteristics of a neurotic obsessional personality.' Freud's interpretation of Leonardo's personality, however, is subject to criticism on several points. The psychoanalytic elucidation of the vulture fantasy is considerably weakened by the fact that Freud wrongly translated the Italian word nibbio (which actually refers to another kind of bird, the kite) as vulture. In this article, the remaining two sources of evidence are critically examined and a neuropsychological explanation, which could be considered an alternative to a psychoanalytic approach to the phenomena, is presented. This neuropsychological interpretation is based on the possibility that Leonardo's brain was organized differently from that of most other human beings, and that this

Psychoanalysis · Mental Health and Psychiatry · Neurology and Historical Studies · Philosophy · Psychology · Psychotherapy Techniques and Applications

• Jo Jeongsan in Context

  Open Access•Introvigne Massimo•Journal of Daesoon Thought and…•2021

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