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SIGMUND FREUD, SUBLIMATION, AND THE RUSSIAN SILVER AGE
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 May 2017
Abstract
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.
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References
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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.
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24 Gay, Freud, 166–7. Gay, Reading Freud, 101, 106.
25 Birmele, “Strategies of Persuasion,” 136–7.
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27 Freud, Leonardo, 105–6, 116, 143–6, 154.
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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.
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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.
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