In Reply to: Freud did a lot of writing on DaVinci posted by have you read... on December 16, 2005 at 13:21:51:
No, I haven't read Freud, but in Leonardo DaVinci: Flights of the Mind the biographer, Charles Nicholl, discusses that book by Freud. According to him:
"Freud essentially analyses the story [a memory from childhood DaVinci purportedly has in which a kite, a type of bird, lands in his cradle and opens his mouth with the tip of its tail] as if it were a dream, with unconscious meanings and memories coded within it. The key to it, he thinks, is the infant Leonardo's relationship with his mother. Some of what he says on this score is untenable because he argues connections with the mother based on symbolic associations of the vulture (he was using a faulty German translation of Leonardo's note, which incorrectly rendered the bird as Geier, a vulture). His learned excurses into Egyptian vulture-symbolism must be discarded, along with much else that seems to the biographer too specifically or elaborately 'Freudian'. But the basic perception -- that this dream or fantasy of Leonardo's, specifically placed in his cradle, is connected with his feelings about his mother -- seems a valuable psychoanalytical insight."
...
"Freud applied these perceptions to what he knew of Leonardo's upbringing, which in 1910 was not as much as we know today.... The fantasy 'seems to tell us', Freud says, that Leonardo 'spent the critical first years of his life not by the side of his father and stepmother, but with his poor, forsaken, real mother'. In this critical phase of infancy, 'certain impressions become fixed and ways of reacting to the outside world are established,' and what here became established was precisely the father's extraneousness. Ser Peiro was absent from the home, outside the intense circle of the mother-child relationship, but was also a threat to it, a potential disruption. Thus the kite fantasy suggests an early tension between the comfort of the mother and the threat of the father, setting the scene for later tensions: 'No one who as a child desires his mother can escape wanting to put himself in his father's place, can fail to identify himself with him in his imagination, and later to make it his task in life to gain ascendancy over him.' That Leonardo's father died in 1504 -- close enough to the approximate date of the note about the kite -- may be significant. Critics of Freud's analysis say that this is piling highly speculative psychology on top of highly speculative history, and they are right, but it has a coherence to it. In the matter of Leonardo's childhood we have only nuances of knowledge, and the speculations of Dr. Freud seem to me to be worth listening to."
There are also other passages in the book that discuss Freud's take on DaVinci.