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Leonardo da Vinci's dream about the kite, which Freud called the “vulture phantasy,” has been the subject of much study and analysis—its relation to science and literary tradition, its unconscious content, and the precipitating factor that might have elicited the dream.
The dreams of a person endowed with enormous gifts, one would assume, are more richly associative than those of an ordinary man. The extraordinary scope of Leonardo's gifts was acknowledged even in his own time. Vasari, a younger contemporary, says of him: “There was such a power of intellect that whatever he turned his mind to, he made himself the master of it.”1 Freud, in his treatise, Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood, speaks of him as a universal genius.2 Not only was he one of the world's greatest artists; he applied his enormous creative energy to sculpture (the lost Sforza monument of a horse), architecture, and hydraulic engineering, to anatomy, optics and mathematics.
In his Notebooks, Leonardo writes,
“In the earliest recollection of my infancy it seemed to me when I was in the cradle that a kite came and opened my mouth with its tail, and struck me within upon the lips with its tail many times.”3
It is a strange image and a striking one. Freud, citing tail (in the Italian, coda) as “one of the most familiar symbols of the male member” and going on from this image to that of the penis-shaped breast nipple,4 states that “what the phantasy conceals is merely a reminiscence of nursing at the mother's