Psychosexual Study of Leonardo da Vinci’s Vulture Fantasy

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Psychosexual Study of Leonardo da Vinci’s Vulture Fantasy

Post by rainbow » Tue Sep 12, 2017 9:24 am

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Re: Psychosexual Study of Leonardo da Vinci’s Vulture Fantas

Post by Hermit » Tue Sep 12, 2017 11:31 am

As far as I know Leonardo only once interspersed in his scientific descriptions a communication from his childhood. In a passage where he speaks about the flight of the vulture, he suddenly interrupts himself in order to follow up a memory from very early years which came to his mind. “It seems that it had been destined before that I should occupy myself so thoroughly with the vulture, for it comes to my mind as a very early memory, when I was still in the cradle, a vulture came down to me, he opened my mouth with his tail and struck me a few times with his tail against my lips.”

We have here an infantile memory and to be sure of the strangest sort. It is strange on account of its content and account of the time of life in which it was fixed. That a person could retain a memory of the nursing period is perhaps not impossible, but it can in no way be taken as certain. But what this memory of Leonardo states, namely, that a vulture opened the child’s mouth with its tail, sounds so improbable, so fabulous, that another conception which puts an end to the two difficulties with one stroke appeals much more to our judgment. The scene of the vulture is not a memory of Leonardo, but a phantasy which he formed later, and transferred into his childhood. The childhood memories of persons often have no different origin, as a matter of fact, they are not fixated from an experience like the conscious memories from the time of maturity and then repeated, but they are not produced until a later period when childhood is already past, they are then changed and disguised and put in the service of later tendencies, so that in general they cannot be strictly differentiated from phantasies.
. . .
When we examine Leonardo’s vulture-phantasy with the eyes of a psychoanalyst then it does not seem strange very long; we recall that we have often found similar structures in dreams, so that we may venture to translate this phantasy from its strange language into words that are universally understood. The translation then follows an erotic direction. Tail, “coda,” is one of the most familiar symbols, as well as a substitutive designation of the male member which is no less true in Italian than in other languages. The situation contained in the phantasy, that a vulture opened the mouth of the child and forcefully belabored it with its tail, corresponds to the idea of fellatio, a sexual act in which the member is placed into the mouth of the other person.
Strangely enough this phantasy is altogether of a passive character; it resembles certain dreams and phantasies of women and of passive homosexuals who play the feminine part in sexual relations.
. . .
The origin of Leonardo’s vulture phantasy can be conceived in the following manner: While reading in the writings of a church father or in a book on natural science that the vultures are all females and that they know to procreate without the coöperation of a male, a memory emerged in him which became transformed into that phantasy, but which meant to say that he also had been such a vulture child, which had a mother but no father. An echo of pleasure which he experienced at his mother’s breast was added to this in the manner as so old impressions alone can manifest themselves. The allusion to the idea of the holy virgin with the child, formed by the authors, which is so dear to every artist, must have contributed to it to make this phantasy seem to him valuable and important. For this helped him to identify himself with the Christ child, the comforter and savior of not alone this one woman.
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Re: Psychosexual Study of Leonardo da Vinci’s Vulture Fantas

Post by Brian Peacock » Tue Sep 12, 2017 12:03 pm

A baby in a cradle is an unreliable witness, even to themselves.
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Re: Psychosexual Study of Leonardo da Vinci’s Vulture Fantas

Post by rainbow » Wed Sep 13, 2017 8:17 am

Also the tree in the background represents a lavatory (lava-tree), indicating that Leo had a bad case of constipation.
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Re: Psychosexual Study of Leonardo da Vinci’s Vulture Fantas

Post by Hermit » Wed Sep 13, 2017 10:32 am

Don't forget the depiction of St. Anne. That's short for "sans antennae". Among Leo's invention was the television, but he never got it to work because he did not know how to design an antenna to suit. So Leo was not receptive to news.

Freud missed that because by his time televisions had become ignored for so long due to their apparent uselessness that the very fact do Vinci already invented them four centuries earlier was forgotten too. No wonder he failed to pick up on the clue to Leo's other problem.
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Re: Psychosexual Study of Leonardo da Vinci’s Vulture Fantas

Post by JimC » Thu Sep 14, 2017 12:35 am

Psychosexual, eh?

Sounds like a good username for a forum like ours... :tea:
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