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Although some of Freud's early followers made halting attempts at the application of his concepts to biography, it remained for the master himself to undertake the first major effort in that direction in his Leonardo essay of 1910. Strikingly, despite the primacy of his interest in literature, the prototypic Renaissance genius to whose life and work Freud first turned his mind (and with whom he clearly identified) was, above all, a painter—arguably the greatest of his or any age. It was, indeed, the Leonardo monograph that began that shaky and ambivalent love affair between psychoanalysis and the history of art that persists to our day and that continues to engage the interest of intrepid and incautious scholars and dilettantes in both fields.
The products of the convergence of these orbits have tended to fall into four general categories—largely following the evolution of psychoanalytic theory itself. First, as exemplified by Leonardo, came the efforts to demonstrate the validity of psychosexual theories by finding in the imagery of works of art symbolic representations of the classic Freudian complexes (this applied, of course, to literary works as well). Second were those studies which, like Greenacre's remarkable reconstructive tours de force, sought to answer the riddle of the developmental origins of creativity. Third were the ego-psychological and integrative essays such as those of Kris and Ehrenzweig that sought to cast light on the psychology of the creative process itself. And more recently we have seen works such as those of Peter Gay which attempt to set all these approaches within a broad historical and social context.
John Gedo, whose previous contributions to the literature have been distinguished as much by the high level of their ambition as by their erudition, scholarship, and conceptual daring, seeks in this collection of essays to attempt an integration of such a synthetic view with his own revisionist approach to psychoanalytic theory.