Chapter VII. The Leonardo Paper (Narcissism)

We have now reached 1910 and I want to spend this chapter on the Leonardo case. It is a paper I always used to dislike, although I have come to think better of it after re-reading it several times. I think that the reason I balked at it originally was that it is the beginning of a very bad tradition in psychoanalysis: Freud calls it a ‘psycho-pathography’, an investigation into the ‘psycho-pathology of great men’, and if one looks at it in that light it is a somewhat unpleasant thing. Although I believe most of the things he says about Leonardo are probably quite correct, and in a sense enlightening, I do not think it requires psycho-analytic insight to reach them. The aspect that is peculiarly psycho-analytic concerns the part about the bird putting its tail in the baby Leonardo's mouth, the preoccupation with the flight of birds, his flying machines, the supposed hidden vulture in ‘The Virgin and Saint Anne’ and similar material. Yet the writing is not good and to my mind is not really even interesting. Therefore I want to put aside this pathography aspect of the paper, which is the only one of its sort that Freud wrote and, in many ways, is one he apologises for and dissociates himself from at the end. However, one must remember that it is an important paper historically; the beginning of that extremely bad tradition in psychoanalytic writing which consists in scrutinising the private lives of great men by supposedly psycho-analytic methods from outside the psycho-analytic setting of the transference. I think it is boring and has probably done quite a lot of harm in particular to the relationship of psycho-analysis to the arts, since it is mainly artists and writers (and to some extent politicians and historical figures) who have received such treatment.

I want to consider now the important connection between Freud and Leonardo and the way in which the paper is autobiographical. It is autobiography in that it relates to the split which I have been talking about fr