Sullivan quotes, from the journals of Robert Musil, a pejorative comment equating psychoanalysis with a closed religious system intent upon explaining the world on a few principles. What can have provoked Musil's sarcastic comment? The evidence suggests that it was the Leonardo study that provoked his antipathy to what he saw as a deeply religious strain in psychoanalysis. But according to Sullivan, the study of Leonardo showed the unsuspected richness and openness of psychoanalysis for its future development, in that it undertook the study of a man of genius rather than of the ordinary mortals who come as patients. Sullivan suggests that the fantasied objector in the Leonardo study, who might question the appropriateness of the psychoanalytic approach, is Leonardo himself. And we may well suppose