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DEAR DR HAYLEY,
In response to the paper by Cecilio Paniagua published in the International Review, Volume 13: 445, entitled 'Notes on a drawing by Leonardo da Vinci', I thought it would be opportune to send some considerations I have written about the genial Florentine.
Historical data about Leonardo, as is shown in Freud's study, reveals transsexual maternal influences in his infantile past. These were in part neutralized, for at 3–4 years of age he was taken to live with his father, then married to another woman. Leonardo, as is well known, was an illegitimate child of a Florentine noble and a peasant woman.
His first years seemed to be typical of those described by Stoller and others for transsexual boys: absent father, a child of great beauty, and raised only by his mother, probably with strong male features in her personality, that is, with transsexual tendencies herself. She would be over-affectionate and attentive, leading to extreme feminization of her boy, favouring an exaggerated 'symbiosis' with her.
The child's memory, which gives the lie to Freud's paper: 'Leonardo da Vinci—a memory of his childhood' was of a kind of hawk forcing his tail between his lips. Freud interpreted it as a 'fellatio' fantasy.
At the present time, knowing about the characteristics of the mothers of transsexuals, who force their femininity into their sons, or rather, who destroy their masculinity, I think we could connect that fantasy with an unconscious feeling of having a 'rapine' mother, who forced her femininity (breast) into her son.
It seems like the relationship 'mother–child' observed by Stoller in a pet shop. A boy whose male gender identity was continuously devoured by his mother, seeing carnivorous fish being fed by gold-fish, asked for one. The mother then replied that he himself was like one of the fishes (undoubtedly the gold-fish).
In Da Vinci's memory, the voracious mother is symbolized by the rapine bird. Freud states that in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics m