Notes on the Leonardo Case

Conceived as the first part of an unpublished broader study, this brief essay by Alessandro Serra analyzes different reactions towards one of Freud’s most famous works: "Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood" (1910). From Ernst Kris to Meyer Schapiro, psychoanalysts, psychologists and art historians agreed to reject the general conclusions of Freud’s essay, yet saving its theoretic assumptions. In fact, Freud’s work would remain an important part of author’s opera only because it represents the first time in which the “pulsion theory” appeared and the concept of “sublimation” is completely developed. But for Serra this is not enough. The author quotes a long passage from Freud’s paper, highlighting the historical and critical influences that contributed to its realisation. He dwells upon the famous mistranslation, which transforms Leonardo’s ‘kite’ into Freud’s ‘vulture’, and reviews Jung’s and the Protestant minister Pfister’s positions (mentioning also that of Christensen, who in a paper published in the influential “Psychoanalytic Review” in 1944 even talks about Leonardo’s eagle). In this way, while emphasizing the sequence of errors in this specific case, Serra reaffirms the importance of the psychoanalytic contribution – and in particular the “psychobiographical” one – for a flexible comprehension of the act of making art, which in the words of Merleau-Ponty which conclude the essay, is understood as an interpretation of the “exchange between the future and the past”