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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 May 2017
Freud's most sustained account of the power of sexual sublimation to fuel scientific and artistic genius is found in his Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood, published in 1910. This article argues that Freud chose Leonardo as the perfect example of sublimation because of his close reading of the then quite popular historical novel Leonardo da Vinci, written by a poet and author of the Russian Silver Age, Dmitrii Merezhkovskii. The central point of Freud's theory of sublimation, that sexuality is at the root of human knowledge and creativity, is developed by Merezhkovskii, but from the religious-philosophical perspective of Silver Age symbolism. Freudian sublimation, as a psychological theory, was developed in dialogue with a Russian religious understanding of Eros and its power. Freud essentially rewrote Merezhkovskii's story of Leonardo, reducing Merezhkovskii's philosophy of Eros to the more “scientifically” grounded theory of sexual sublimation.
1 Valdre, Rossella, On Sublimation: A Path to the Destiny of Desire, Theory, and Treatment (London, 2014), 20–22Google Scholar. Bradley Collins notes that dozens of books and articles have been written on this single work. Collins, Bradley I., Leonardo, Psychoanalysis and Art History: A Critical Study of Psychobiographical Approaches to Leonardo da Vinci (Evanston, 1997)Google Scholar, 3.
2 Birmele, Jutta, “Strategies of Persuasion: The Case of Leonardo da Vinci,” in Gilman, Sander L., Birmele, Jutta, and Greenberg, Valerie D., eds., Reading Freud's Reading (New York, 1994), 129–51Google Scholar, esp. 133–4; Sassoon, Donald, Becoming Mona Lisa: The Making of a Global Icon (New York, 2001)Google Scholar, 103, 111, 124–5, 128–9.
3 Farrell, John, “The Birth of the Psychoanalytic Hero: Freud's Platonic Leonardo,” Philosophy and Literature 31/2 (2007), 233–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. 234–5; Eissler, K. R., Leonardo da Vinci: Psychoanalytical Notes on the Enigma (New York, 1961)Google Scholar, 10; Gay, Peter, Freud: A Life for Our Time (New York, 1998)Google Scholar, 272; and Elms, Alan C., “Freud as Leonardo: Why the First Psychobiography Went Wrong,” Journal of Personality 56/1 (1988), 19–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
4 Farrell, “The Birth of the Psychoanalytic Hero,” 242; Rose, Louis, The Freudian Calling: Early Viennese Psychoanalysis and the Pursuit of Cultural Science (Detroit, 1998), 105–6Google Scholar; Rorty, Amelie Oksenberg, “Freud on Unconscious Affects, Mourning, and the Erotic Mind,” in Levine, Michael, ed., Analytic Freud: Philosophy and Psychoanalysis (New York, 2002), 195–210, at 197–8Google Scholar; Caze, Marguerite La, “Sublimation, Love and Creativity,” in ibid., 261–76, at 261–4. Eckart Goebel places particular emphasis on the mechanical, “hydraulic,” aspect of Freud's understanding of sublimation in Beyond Discontent: “Sublimation” from Goethe to Lacan (New York, 2012), 124–8Google Scholar.
5 Gay, Freud, 274; Elms, “Freud as Leonardo,” 22.
6 Rose, The Freudian Calling, 101; Gay, Freud, 274; Israëls, H., “Freud and the Vulture,” History of Psychiatry 4 (1993), 577–86CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 580–81.
7 Freud, Sigmund, Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood, trans. Alan Tyson (New York, 1963)Google Scholar, 99.
8 Birmele, “Strategies of Persuasion,” 132.
9 Freud, Leonardo, 117. This story about Leonardo's childhood has been exhaustively debated, and most details above are contradicted by the historical evidence. This has not prevented those favorable to Freud's interpretation from claiming that Freud's analysis of Leonardo remained essentially correct. For the details of the debate see Collins, Leonardo, 45–8. I will discuss the question of the mistranslation of the word “vulture” below.
10 Freud, Leonardo, 121–37.
11 Ibid., 138–42. Further discussion of Freud's view of homosexuality, especially as laid out in Leonardo, can be found in Davis, Whitney, Queer Beauty: Sexuality and Aesthetics from Winckelman to Freud and Beyond (New York, 2010), 199–203CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Halpern, Richard, Shakespeare's Perfume: Sodomy and Sublimity in the Sonnets, Wilde, Freud, and Lacan (Philadelphia, 2002), 60–65Google Scholar.
12 Freud, Leonardo, 107.
13 Ibid., 114–15. Freud makes a somewhat contradictory exception later in the text (172–4), suggesting that Leonardo's obsession with flight and flying machines was evidence of a sublimated desire for the sexual act. More on Freud's link between sexuality and knowledge can be found in Blass, Rachel B., “A Psychoanalytic Understanding of the Desire for Knowledge as Reflected in Freud's Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood,” International Journal of Psychoanalysis 87/5 (2006), 1259–76CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
14 Freud, Leonardo, 154–63. For the similarities between Leonardo and Interpretation in the elucidation of the meaning of symbols see Rose, The Freudian Calling, 110; Kofman, Sarah, The Childhood of Art: An Interpretation of Freud's Aesthetics (New York, 1988), 60–61Google Scholar.
15 Freud, Leonardo, 150, explicitly addresses the “powerful and confusing” effect of the smile on observers of the painting.
16 Ibid., 150–51, 154–5.
17 Ibid., 162–3.
18 The circularity of Freud's use of artistic evidence to reveal psychological states is discussed by Collins, Leonardo, 31.
19 Freud, Leonardo, 25. Eckhart Goebel claims that Freud was not always consistent in his discussions of the effects of sublimation. He also points out the difficulty of Freud's circular reasoning that culture creates sublimation, which then creates more culture. See Goebel, Beyond Discontent, 115.
20 Gay, Freud, 273–4.
21 The edition Freud used was Mereschkowski, Dimitri Sergejewitsch, Leonardo da Vinci, trans. Carl von Giitschow, 2nd edn (Leipzig, 1906)Google Scholar. For an analysis of Freud's list of “good” books, and Merezhkovsky's place on the list, see Gay, Peter, Reading Freud: Explorations and Entertainments (New Haven, 1990), 95–124Google Scholar. The other book in the Freud Library is Herzfeld's, Marie Leonardo da Vinci: Der Denker, Forscher und Poet. Nach den veroffentlichen Handschriften, trans. and ed. Herzfeld, Marie (Jena, 1906)Google Scholar. See Trosman, Harry and Simmons, R. D., “The Freud Library,” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 21/3 (1973), 646–87CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed. I would like to thank the Freud Library, and particularly Bryony Davis, for providing me with scans of the pages of the Merezhkovsky novel which contain Freud's markings. I will further discuss the nature and significance of Freud's markings below.
22 Rose, The Freudian Calling, 99; Alan Tyson, “Editor's Note,” in Freud, Sigmund, Leonardo da Vinci: A Memory of His Childhood (New York, 2002)Google Scholar, 4; Farrell, “The Birth of the Psychoanalytic Hero”; Halpern, Shakespeare's Perfume, 61; Davis, Queer Beauty, 201. Collins, citing E. H. Gombrich, does acknowledge that there are multiple aspects of Leonardo's biography that Freud used, and Peter L. Rudnytsky states plainly that “it is clear that Freud's reading of Merezhkovsky was decisive in crystallizing his interpretation of the book.” See Collins, Leonardo, 188, and Rudnytsky, Peter L., Reading Psychoanalysis: Freud, Rank, Ferenczi, Groddeck (Ithaca, 2002)Google Scholar, 7. Even scholars of the reception of Freud in Russia have ignored the full significance of Freud's reading of Merezhkovskii. Anna Lisa Crone, for example, devotes two paragraphs and one footnote to Freud's reading of Merezhkovskii in her well-reviewed book Eros and Creativity in Russian Religious Renewal: The Philosophers and the Freudians (Leiden, 2010), 90. Alexander Etkind also mentions Merezhkovskii's influence on Freud in passing, in Eros of the Impossible: The History of Psychoanalysis in Russia (Boulder, 1997), 26. Jenifer Presto is also brief on the subject, but definitive: Merezhkovskii's Leonardo had a “profound effect” on Freud (though she does not elaborate). I will slightly disagree with her contention that Merezhkovskii discovered “sublimation” before Freud below. See Presto, Jenifer, Beyond the Flesh: Alexander Blok, Zinaida Gippius, and the Symbolist Sublimation of Sex (Madison, 2009), 4–5Google Scholar.
23 Freud's mistranslation of Leonardo's word for “kite” (nibbio in Italian) was first noted in 1923 by the art historian Eric Maclagan and has been thoroughly discussed since (including by James Strachey, editor of Freud's collected works), with various scholars debating both the origin of the error and its significance to Freud's overall argument. Han Israëls provides the most thorough summary of the discussion and his interpretation of the error in Israëls, “Freud and the Vulture.” See also Collins, Leonardo, 45–8.
24 Gay, Freud, 166–7. Gay, Reading Freud, 101, 106.
25 Birmele, “Strategies of Persuasion,” 136–7.
26 These details are all presented in Rice, James, Freud's Russia: National Identity in the Evolution of Psychoanalysis (New Brunswick, 1993)Google Scholar, 99, 115, 123, 126, 210.
27 Freud, Leonardo, 105–6, 116, 143–6, 154.
28 Trosman and Simmons, “Freud Library,” 651.
29 Markings in Freud's copy of Merezhkovskii's Leonardo that note the above can be found at 158, 162, 164, 172, 252, 288, 289, 333, 363, 364, 367, 368 369, 374, 377, 379, 460, 474. Birmele thus errs when she claims that Freud left unmarked the passage where Leonardo climbs into his mother's bed. She also erroneously claims that Merezhkovskii discredited the accusations of homosexuality against Leonardo, failing to notice the passage where Merezhkovskii strongly hints at a deep attraction between Leonardo and one of his young pupils. Birmele, “Strategies of Persuasion,” 137–8.
30 General histories of Russian symbolism and the Silver Age include Paperno, Irina and Grossman, Joan Delaney, eds., Creating Life: The Aesthetic Utopia of Russian Modernism (Stanford, 1994)Google Scholar; Pyman, Avril, A History of Russian Symbolism (Cambridge, 1994)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bogomolov, N. A. and Keldysh, V. A., eds., Russkaia literatura rubezha vekhov (1890-e—nachalo 1920kh godov) (Moscow, 2000)Google Scholar; Voskresenskaia, M. A., Simvolism kak mirovidenie serebrianogo veka: Sotsiokul'turnye faktory formirovaniia obshchestvennogo soznaniia rossiiskoi kul'turnoi elity rubezha XIX–XX vekov (Tomsk, 2003)Google Scholar.
31 Merezhkovskii, D., “O prichinakh upadka i o novykh techeniakh sovremennoi russkoi literatury,” in Merezhkovskii, L. Tolstoi i Dostoevskii: Vechnye sputniki (Moscow, 1995), 522–603, at 536–7Google Scholar.
32 On the relationship between the Silver Age and Romanticism see West, J. D., “Neo-Romanticism in the Russian Symbolist Aesthetic,” Slavonic and East European Review 51/124 (1973), 413–27Google Scholar; and Antonova, Clemena, “‘The World Will Be Saved by Beauty’: The Revival of Romantic Theories of the Symbol in Pavel Florenskii's Works,” Slavonica 14/1 (2008), 44–56CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
33 Irina Paperno, “The Meaning of Art: Symbolist Theories,” in Paperno and Grossman, Creating Life, 13–23, at 13. An excellent exposition of the importance of understanding Orthodox Christian theology, especially the theology of icon and “Logos,” for key figures in the Silver Age can be found in Cassedy, Steven, Flight from Eden: The Origins of Modern Literary Criticism and Theory (Berkeley, 1990)Google Scholar. The discussion of incarnation and transfiguration can be found at 107–8.
34 Paperno, “The Meaning of Art,” 13.
35 Merezhkovskii, “O prichinakh,” 537, original emphasis.
36 See Antonova, “The World Will Be Saved.” See also Irina Paperno, “Introduction,” in Paperno and Grossman, Creating Life, 1–12, at 1; and Reynolds, Andrew, “Living Is an Art: Some Recent Books on Russian Modernism,” Journal of European Studies 26 (1996), 195–208CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Michael Wachtel locates the origins of zhiznetvorchestvo in the ideas of Solov′ev. See Wachtel, Michael, Russian Symbolism and Literary Tradition: Goethe, Novalis, and the Poetics of Vyacheslav Ivanov (Madison, 1994), 144–5Google Scholar.
37 Bryusov, “A Holy Sacrifice,” in Peterson, E., ed. and trans., The Russian Symbolists: An Anthology of Critical and Theoretical Writings (Ann Arbor, 1986), 65–9, at 68–9Google Scholar.
38 Interpretation and contextualization of The Kreutzer Sonata can be found in Hooper, Cynthia, “Forms of Love: Vladimir Solov′ev and Lev Tolstoy on Eros and Ego,” Russian Review 60/3 (2001), 360–80CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and in Engelstein, Laura, The Keys to Happiness: Sex and the Search for Modernity in Fin-de-Siècle Russia (Ithaca, 1992), 218–20Google Scholar.
39 See Crone, Anna Lisa, Eros and Creativity in the Russian Religious Renewal (Leiden, 2010), 70–71CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Evgenii Bershtein, “The Notion of Universal Bisexuality in Russian Religious Philosophy,” in Risto Alapuro, Arto Mustajoki, and Pekka Pesonen, eds., Understanding Russianness (New York, 2012), 210–31, at 214. Olga Matich especially emphasizes Rozanov's fascination with the physiological and biological elements of sexuality in Erotic Utopia: The Decadent Imagination in Russia's Fin de Siecle (Madison, 2005), 237–41.
40 Hooper, “Forms of Love,” 361.
41 Solov′ev, Vladimir, The Meaning of Love, ed. and trans. Beyer, Thomas R. Jr. (Hudson, NY, 1985)Google Scholar, 76, 79, 82–3; Hooper, “Forms of Love,” 362–3. On the Platonic origins of Solov′ev's philosophy see Kornblatt, Judith Deutsch, “The Transfiguration of Plato in the Erotic Philosophy of Vladimir Solov′ev,” Religion & Literature 24/2 (1992), 35–50Google Scholar. Matich argues that Solov′ev champions an “erotic utopia,” but her conception of his work relies on a theory of sublimation that I will address later in this article. See Olga Matich, “The Symbolist Meaning of Love: Theory and Practice,” in Paperno and Grossman, Creating Life, 24–50, esp. 26–32.
42 Solov′ev, The Meaning of Love, 51, 92–3.
43 Ibid., 93, 83.
44 Ivanov, “Thoughts about Symbolism,” in Forrester, Sibelan E. S. and Kelly, Martha M. F., eds., Russian Silver Age Poetry: Texts and Contexts (Boston, 2015)Google Scholar, 321–8, at 323.
45 See Berdiaev, Nikolai, The Meaning of the Creative Act (New York, 2009), 214, 224Google Scholar.
46 Polovinkina, S. M., Zapiski peterburgkikh Religiozno-filosofskikh sobranii (1901–1903gg.) (Moscow, 2005), 214–353Google Scholar, esp. 215, 228, 251–5.
47 Olga Matich argues that Solov′ev himself believed in abstinence, rejecting sexuality as linked to death. But she does note that his Meaning of Love is ambiguous on that subject. See Matich, Erotic Utopia, 60–61, 73–4.
48 Berdiaev, The Meaning of the Creative Act, 201. The anti-procreative and chaste ideal of the Silver Age is discussed extensively in Matich, Erotic Utopia; and in Presto, Beyond the Flesh.
49 Merezhkovskii, Dmitrii, Voskresshie bogi, ili Leonardo da Vinci (Moscow, 2000)Google Scholar, 448, 531.
50 Merezhkovskii, Voskresshie, 175, 186.
51 Blass, “A Psychoanalytic Understanding,” 1269.
52 Merezhkovskii, Voskresshie, 315. Freud's portrait of Leonardo corresponds closely to Giovanni's nightmare: “There is scarcely any doubt that Leonardo had prevailed over both dogmatic and personal religion, and had by his work of research removed himself far from the position from which the Christian believer surveys the world.” But he also critiqued Leonardo's assertion that love is the daughter of knowledge—saying that Leonardo failed to see that the pleasure he felt at the accomplishment of scientific research was not love, but the release of sublimated sexual affect that inspired his scientific endeavors. See Freud, Leonardo, 106–7.
53 Merezhkkovskii, Voskresshie, 502.
54 Freud marked this passage in his edition of the text. In his own work, he only mentioned the “smile,” that was so like the Mona Lisa smile. For Freud, this was further evidence that Leonardo was still under the influence of his mother's powerful smile, and painted it in both St Anne (which represented Leonardo's grandmother) and Mary (who represented his own mother). Freud, Leonardo, 156–7. The “smile” will be discussed further below.
55 Merezhkovskii, Voskresshie, 53.
56 Matich, Erotic Utopia, 7–8, 17; Presto, Beyond the Flesh, 6–7; Crone, Eros and Creativity, 1.
57 See Gay, Freud, 269; Birmele, “Strategies of Persuasion,” 144–5.
58 I would like to thank one of my anonymous reviewers for this particularly striking insight.
59 Crone, Eros and Creativity, 2.
60 Rudnytsky briefly also argues for Freud's borrowing of Merezhkovskii's narrative style, writing that “because Freud based his study of Leonardo on a fictionalized treatment, his admission that he may have written only a ‘psychoanalytic novel’ places his work in its proper generic context.” Rudnytsky, Reading Psychoanalysis, 7. For Freud's scientific anxiety see Makari, George, Revolution in Mind: The Creation of Psychoanalysis (New York, 2009)Google Scholar, esp. 105–7, 115–16, 120–22, especially for Freud's efforts to make the study of sexuality scientific. I am indebted to Harold Mah for pointing out this aspect of Freud's project.
61 Israëls, “Freud and the Vulture,” 580–81. Israëls's article contains a direct transcription of the quote from the minutes of the lecture, and he is definitive regarding Freud's intentional use of the word “vulture” translation despite his awareness that it was a mistranslation.
62 This directly contradicts Peter Gay's argument that Freud discovered this quote “amidst the vast morass of Leonardo's notebooks.” Gay, Freud, 270.
63 Freud did agree that Leonardo was a kind of forerunner, and quoted Merezhkovskii's “admirable” summation of Leonardo: “He was like a man who has awakened in the darkness, at too early an hour, when all others are still asleep.” Merezhkovskii, of course, was referring the Leonardo's status as a cultural and spiritual John the Baptist. Freud reinterpreted the quote to praise Leonardo as a dispassionate scientist, ahead of his time, much like (as some scholars think) Freud himself. Freud, Leonardo, 82.
64 Merezhkovskii, Voskresshie, 413; Freud, Leonardo, 173. The passage below it, regarding the wonder of flight, was quoted by Freud in Leonardo, 172.
65 Goebel makes this point as well, insisting that, for Freud, “all love is rooted in sexual desire, and that love is at heart, a material and biological urge that must be expressed in some fashion.” Goebel, Beyond Discontent, 137–8. Makari argues that, from the very beginning, Freud wished only to see mental states as originating in the patient alone, so that the cure would rest in the proper reordering of the patient's mind. For him, this was the key to rendering psychoanalysis scientific. See Makari, Revolution in Mind, 58–9.
66 Merezhkovskii, Voskresshie, 531–2.
67 Ibid., 516–17.
68 Ibid., 532.
69 Ibid., 532. This echoes Plato's idea of “birth in beauty,” which was adopted by Solov′ev as well. See Kornblatt, “The Transfiguration of Plato,” 42–3.
70 Plato had a similar view of Eros as procreative. See Sandford, Stella, “Sexually Ambiguous,” Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 11/3 (2006), 43–59CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
71 Freud, Leonardo, 154, 162–3.
72 Farrell, “The Birth of the Psychoanalytic Hero,” 246–7.
73 Kuspit, D., “Freud and the Visual Arts,” Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies 2/1 (2000), 25–39, at 28–9CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
74 Laplanche, Jean, “The Theory of Seduction and the Problem of the Other,” International Journal of Psycho-analysis 78 (1997), 653–66, at 664, original emphasisGoogle ScholarPubMed.
75 Florensky, Pavel, The Pillar and Ground of the Truth: An Essay in Orthodox Theodicy in Twelve Letters, trans. Boris Jakim (Princeton, 1997)Google Scholar, 57.
76 Ibid., 67–8.
77 Ibid., 67. The similarity of Florenskii's language here to that of Martin Buber and Emmanuel Levinas has been noted by a few scholars. But the possibility of some kind of influence has never been fully explored. See Kozin, Alexander V., “Iconic Wonder: Pavel Florensky's phenomenology of the face,” Studies in East European Thought 59 (2007), 293–308CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Patterson, David, Exile: The Sense of Alienation in Modern Russian Letters (Lexington, 2015), 80–81Google Scholar.