by no means remained as an indifferent anecdote as in the case of the
analogous fable of the scarebaeus beetles; that church fathers mastered
it in order to have it ready as an argument from natural history against
those who doubted the sacred history. If according the best information
from antiquity the vultures were directed to let themselves be
impregnated by the wind, why should the same thing not have happened
even once in a human female? On account of this use the church fathers
were "almost all" in the habit of relating this vulture fable, and now
it can hardly remain doubtful that it also became known to Leonardo
through so powerful a source.
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 cooeperation 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.
When we break up an infantile phantasy we strive to separate the real
memory content from the later motives which modify and distort the same.
In the case of Leonardo we now think that we know the real content of
the phantasy. The replacement of the mother by the vulture indicates
that the child missed the father and felt himself alone with his mother.
The fact of Leonardo's illegitimate birth fits in with his vulture
phantasy; only on account of it was he able to compare himself with a
vulture child. But we have discovered as the next definite fact from his
youth that at the age of five years he had already been received in his
father's home; when this took place, whether a few months following his
birth, or a few weeks before the taking of the assessment of taxes, is
entirely unknown to us. The interpretation of the vulture phantasy then
steps in and wants to tell us that Leonardo did not spend the first
decisive years of his life with his father and his step-mother but with
his poor, forsaken, real mother, so that he had time to miss his father.
This still seems to be a rather meager and rather daring result of the
psychoanalytic effort, but on further reflection it will gain in
significance. Certainty will be promoted by mentioning the actual
relations in Leonardo's childhood. According to the reports, his father
Ser Piero da Vinci married the prominent Donna Albiera during the year
of Leonardo's birth; it was to the childlessness of this marriage that
the boy owed his legalized reception into his father's or rather
grandfather's house during his fifth year. However, it is not customary
to offer an illegitimate offspring to a young woman's care at the
beginning of marriage when she is still expecting to be blessed with
children. Years of disappointment must have elapsed before it was
decided to adopt the probably handsomely developed illegitimate child as
a compensation for legitimate children who were vainly hoped for. It
harmonizes best with the interpretation of the vulture-phantasy, if at
least three years or perhaps five years of Leonardo's life had elapsed
before he changed from his lonely mother to his father's home. But then
it had already become too late. In the first three or four years of life
impressions are fixed and modes of reactions are formed towards the
outer world which can never be robbed of their importance by any later
experiences.
If it is true that the incomprehensible childhood reminiscences and the
person's phantasies based on them always bring out the most significant
of his psychic development, then the fact corroborated by the vulture
phantasy, that Leonardo passed the first years of his life alone with
his mother must have been a most decisive influence on the formation of
his inner life. Under the effect of this constellation it could not have
been otherwise than that the child which in his young life encountered
one problem more than other children, should have begun to ponder very
passionately over this riddle and thus should have become an
investigator early in life. For he was tortured by the great questions
where do children come from and what has the father to do with their
origin. The vague knowledge of this connection between his investigation
and his childhood history has later drawn from him the exclamation that
it was destined that he should deeply occupy himself with the problem of
the bird's flight, for already in his cradle he had been visited by a
vulture. To trace the curiosity which is directed to the flight of the
bird to the infantile sexual investigation will be a later task which
will not be difficult to accomplish.
III
The element of the vulture represents to us the real memory content in
Leonardo's childhood phantasy; the association into which Leonardo
himself placed his phantasy threw a bright light on the importance of
this content for his later life. In continuing the work of
interpretation we now encounter the strange problem why this memory
content was elaborated into a homosexual situation. The mother who
nursed the child, or rather from whom the child suckled was transformed
into a vulture which stuck its tail into the child's mouth. We maintain
that the "coda" (tail) of the vulture, following the common substituting
usages of language, cannot signify anything else but a male genital or
penis. But we do not understand how the phantastic activity came to
furnish precisely this maternal bird with the mark of masculinity, and
in view of this absurdity we become confused at the possibility of
reducing this phantastic structure to rational sense.
However, we must not despair. How many seemingly absurd dreams have we
not forced to give up their sense! Why should it become more difficult
to accomplish this in a childhood phantasy than in a dream!
Let us remember the fact that it is not good to find one isolated
peculiarity, and let us hasten to add another to it which is still more
striking.
The vulture-headed goddess _Mut_ of the Egyptians, a figure of
altogether impersonal character, as expressed by Drexel in Roscher's
lexicon, was often fused with other maternal deities of living
individuality like Isis and Hathor, but she retained besides her
separate existence and reverence. It was especially characteristic of
the Egyptian pantheon that the individual gods did not perish in this
amalgamation. Besides the composition of deities the simple divine image
remained in her independence. In most representations the vulture-headed
maternal deity was formed by the Egyptians in a phallic manner,[35] her
body which was distinguished as feminine by its breasts also bore the
masculine member in a state of erection.
The goddess Mut thus evinced the same union of maternal and paternal
characteristics as in Leonardo's vulture phantasy. Should we explain
this concurrence by the assumption that Leonardo knew from studying his
book the androgynous nature of the maternal vulture? Such possibility is
more than questionable; it seems that the sources accessible to him
contained nothing of remarkable determination. It is more likely that
here as there the agreement is to be traced to a common, effective and
unknown motive.
Mythology can teach us that the androgynous formation, the union of
masculine and feminine sex characteristics, did not belong to the
goddess Mut alone but also to other deities such as Isis and Hathor, but
in the latter perhaps only insofar as they possessed also a motherly
nature and became fused with the goddess Mut.[36] It teaches us further
that other Egyptian deities such as Neith of Sais out of whom the Greek
Athene was later formed, were originally conceived as androgynous or
dihermaphroditic, and that the same held true for many of the Greek
gods, especially of the Dionysian circle, as well as for Aphrodite who
was later restricted to a feminine love deity. Mythology may also offer
the explanation that the phallus which was added to the feminine body
was meant to denote the creative primitive force of nature, and that all
these hermaphroditic deistic formations express the idea that only a
union of the masculine and feminine elements can result in a worthy
representation of divine perfection. But none of these observations
explain the psychological riddle, namely, that the phantasy of men takes
no offense at the fact that a figure which was to embody the essence of
the mother should be provided with the mark of the masculine power which
is the opposite of motherhood.
The explanation comes from the infantile sexual theories. There really
was a time in which the male genital was found to be compatible with
the representation of the mother. When the male child first directs his
curiosity to the riddle of the sexual life, he is dominated by the
interest for his own genitals. He finds this part of the body too
valuable and too important to believe that it would be missing in other
persons to whom he feels such a resemblance. As he cannot divine that
there is still another equally valuable type of genital formation he
must grasp the assumption that all persons, also women, possess such a
member as he. This preconception is so firm in the youthful investigator
that it is not destroyed even by the first observation of the genitals
in little girls. His perception naturally tells him that there is
something different here than in him, but he is unable to admit to
himself as the content of this perception that he cannot find this
member in girls. That this member may be missing is to him a dismal and
unbearable thought, and he therefore seeks to reconcile it by deciding
that it also exists in girls but it is still very small and that it will
grow later.[37] If this expectation does not appear to be fulfilled on
later observation he has at his disposal another way of escape. The
member also existed in the little girl but it was cut off and on its
place there remained a wound. This progress of the theory already makes
use of his own painful experience; he was threatened in the meantime
that this important organ will be taken away from him if it will form
too much of an interest for his occupation. Under the influence of this
threat of castration he now interprets his conception of the female
genital, henceforth he will tremble for his masculinity, but at the same
time he will look with contempt upon those unhappy creatures upon whom,
in his opinion, this cruel punishment had already been visited.
Before the child came under the domination of the castration complex, at
the time when he still held the woman at her full value, he began to
manifest an intensive desire to look as an erotic activity of his
impulse. He wished to see the genitals of other persons, originally
probably because he wished to compare them with his own. The erotic
attraction which emanated from the person of his mother soon reached
its height in the longing to see her genital which he believed to be a
penis. With the cognition acquired only later that the woman has no
penis, this longing often becomes transformed into its opposite and
gives place to disgust, which in the years of puberty may become the
cause of psychic impotence, of misogyny and of lasting homosexuality.
But the fixation on the once so vividly desired object, the penis of the
woman, leaves ineradicable traces in the psychic life of the child,
which has gone through that fragment of infantile sexual investigation
with particular thoroughness. The fetich-like reverence for the feminine
foot and shoe seems to take the foot only as a substitutive symbol for
the once revered and since then missed member of the woman. The
"braid-slashers" without knowing it play the part of persons who perform
the act of castration on the female genital.
One will not gain any correct understanding of the activities of the
infantile sexuality and probably will consider these communications
unworthy of belief, as long as one does not relinquish the attitude of
our cultural depreciation of the genitals and of the sexual functions in
general. To understand the infantile psychic life one has to look to
analogies from primitive times. For a long series of generations we have
been in the habit of considering the genitals or _pudenda_ as objects of
shame, and in the case of more successful sexual repression as objects
of disgust. The majority of those living to-day only reluctantly obey
the laws of propagation, feeling thereby that their human dignity is
being offended and degraded. What exists among us of the other
conception of the sexual life is found only in the uncultivated and in
the lower social strata; among the higher and more refined types it is
concealed as culturally inferior, and its activity is ventured only
under the embittered admonition of a guilty conscience. It was quite
different in the primitive times of the human race. From the laborious
collections of students of civilization one gains the conviction that
the genitals were originally the pride and hope of living beings, they
enjoyed divine worship, and the divine nature of their functions was
transported to all newly acquired activities of mankind. Through
sublimation of its essential elements there arose innumerable
god-figures, and at the time when the relation of official religions
with sexual activity was already hidden from the general consciousness,
secret cults labored to preserve it alive among a number of the
initiated. In the course of cultural development it finally happened
that so much godliness and holiness had been extracted from sexuality
that the exhausted remnant fell into contempt. But considering the
indestructibility which is in the nature of all psychic impressions one
need not wonder that even the most primitive forms of genital worship
could be demonstrated until quite recent times, and that language,
customs and superstitions of present day humanity contain the remnants
of all phases of this course of development.[38]
Important biological analogies have taught us that the psychic
development of the individual is a short repetition of the course of
development of the race, and we shall therefore not find improbable what
the psychoanalytic investigation of the child's psyche asserts
concerning the infantile estimation of the genitals. The infantile
assumption of the maternal penis is thus the common source of origin for
the androgynous formation of the maternal deities like the Egyptian
goddess Mut and the vulture's "coda" (tail) in Leonardo's childhood
phantasy. As a matter of fact, it is only through misunderstanding that
these deistic representations are designated hermaphroditic in the
medical sense of the word. In none of them is there a union of the true
genitals of both sexes as they are united in some deformed beings to the
disgust of every human eye; but besides the breast as a mark of
motherhood there is also the male member, just as it existed in the
first imagination of the child about his mother's body. Mythology has
retained for the faithful this revered and very early fancied bodily
formation of the mother. The prominence given to the vulture-tail in
Leonardo's phantasy we can now translate as follows: At that time when I
directed my tender curiosity to my mother I still adjudged to her a
genital like my own. A further testimonial of Leonardo's precocious
sexual investigation, which in our opinion became decisive for his
entire life.
A brief reflection now admonishes us that we should not be satisfied
with the explanation of the vulture-tail in Leonardo's childhood
phantasy. It seems as if it contained more than we as yet understand.
For its more striking feature really consisted in the fact that the
nursing at the mother's breast was transformed into being nursed, that
is into a passive act which thus gives the situation an undoubted
homosexual character. Mindful of the historical probability that
Leonardo behaved in life as a homosexual in feeling, the question
obtrudes itself whether this phantasy does not point to a causal
connection between Leonardo's childhood relations to his mother and the
later manifest, if only ideal, homosexuality. We would not venture to
draw such conclusion from Leonardo's disfigured reminiscence were it not
for the fact that we know from our psychoanalytic investigation of
homosexual patients that such a relation exists, indeed it really is an
intimate and necessary relation.
Homosexual men who have started in our times an energetic action against
the legal limitations of their sexual activity are fond of representing
themselves through theoretical spokesmen as evincing a sexual variation,
which may be distinguished from the very beginning, as an intermediate
stage of sex or as "a third sex." In other words, they maintain that
they are men who are forced by organic determinants originating in the
germ to find that pleasure in the man which they cannot feel in the
woman. As much as one would wish to subscribe to their demands out of
humane considerations, one must nevertheless exercise reserve regarding
their theories which were formulated without regard for the psychic
genesis of homosexuality. Psychoanalysis offers the means to fill this
gap and to put to test the assertions of the homosexuals. It is true
that psychoanalysis fulfilled this task in only a small number of
people, but all investigation thus far undertaken brought the same
surprising results.[39] In all our male homosexuals there was a very
intensive erotic attachment to a feminine person, as a rule to the
mother, which was manifest in the very first period of childhood and
later entirely forgotten by the individual. This attachment was produced
or favored by too much love from the mother herself, but was also
furthered by the retirement or absence of the father during the
childhood period. Sadger emphasizes the fact that the mothers of his
homosexual patients were often man-women, or women with energetic traits
of character who were able to crowd out the father from the place
allotted to him in the family. I have sometimes observed the same thing,
but I was more impressed by those cases in which the father was absent
from the beginning or disappeared early so that the boy was altogether
under feminine influence. It almost seems that the presence of a strong
father would assure for the son the proper decision in the selection of
his object from the opposite sex.
Following this primary stage, a transformation takes place whose
mechanisms we know but whose motive forces we have not yet grasped. The
love of the mother cannot continue to develop consciously so that it
merges into repression. The boy represses the love for the mother by
putting himself in her place, by identifying himself with her, and by
taking his own person as a model through the similarity of which he is
guided in the selection of his love object. He thus becomes homosexual;
as a matter of fact he returns to the stage of autoerotism, for the boys
whom the growing adult now loves are only substitutive persons or
revivals of his own childish person, whom he loves in the same way as
his mother loved him. We say that he finds his love object on the road
to narcism, for the Greek legend called a boy Narcissus to whom nothing
was more pleasing than his own mirrored image, and who became
transformed into a beautiful flower of this name.
Deeper psychological discussions justify the assertion that the person
who becomes homosexual in this manner remains fixed in his unconscious
on the memory picture or his mother, By repressing the love for his
mother he conserves the same in his unconscious and henceforth remains
faithful to her. When as a lover he seems to pursue boys, he really thus
runs away from women who could cause him to become faithless to his
mother. Through direct observation of individual cases we could
demonstrate that he who is seemingly receptive only of masculine stimuli
is in reality influenced by the charms emanating from women just like a
normal person, but each and every time he hastens to transfer the
stimulus he received from the woman to a male object and in this manner
he repeats again and again the mechanism through which he acquired his
homosexuality.
It is far from us to exaggerate the importance of these explanations
concerning the psychic genesis of homosexuality. It is quite clear that
they are in crass opposition to the official theories of the homosexual
spokesmen, but we are aware that these explanations are not sufficiently
comprehensive to render possible a final explanation of the problem.
What one calls homosexual for practical purposes may have its origin in
a variety of psychosexual inhibiting processes, and the process
recognized by us is perhaps only one among many, and has reference only
to one type of "homosexuality." We must also admit, that the number of
cases in our homosexual type which shows the conditions required by us,
exceeds by far those cases in which the resulting effect really appears,
so that even we cannot reject the supposed cooeperation of unknown
constitutional factors from which one was otherwise wont to deduce the
whole of homosexuality. As a matter of fact there would be no occasion
for entering into the psychic genesis of the form of homosexuality
studied by us if there were not a strong presumption that Leonardo, from
whose vulture-phantasy we started, really belonged to this one type of
homosexuality.
As little as is known concerning the sexual behavior of the great artist
and investigator, we must still trust to the probability that the
testimonies of his contemporaries did not go far astray. In the light of
this tradition he appears to us as a man whose sexual need and activity
were extraordinarily low, as if a higher striving had raised him above
the common animal need of mankind. It may be open to doubt whether he
ever sought direct sexual gratification, and in what manner, or whether
he could dispense with it altogether. We are justified, however, to look
also in him for those emotional streams which imperatively force others
to the sexual act, for we cannot imagine a human psychic life in whose
development the sexual desire in the broadest sense, the libido, has not
had its share, whether the latter has withdrawn itself far from the
original aim or whether it was detained from being put into execution.
Anything but traces of unchanged sexual desire we need not expect in
Leonardo. These point however to one direction and allow us to count him
among homosexuals. It has always been emphasized that he took as his
pupils only strikingly handsome boys and youths. He was kind and
considerate towards them, he cared for them and nursed them himself when
they were ill, just like a mother nurses her children, as his own mother
might have cared for him. As he selected them on account of their
beauty rather than their talent, none of them--Cesare da Sesto, G.
Boltraffio, Andrea Salaino, Francesco Melzi and the others--ever became
a prominent artist. Most of them could not make themselves independent
of their master and disappeared after his death without leaving a more
definite physiognomy to the history of art. The others who by their
productions earned the right to call themselves his pupils, as Luini and
Bazzi, nicknamed Sodoma, he probably did not know personally.
We realize that we will have to face the objection that Leonardo's
behavior towards his pupils surely had nothing to do with sexual
motives, and permits no conclusion as to his sexual peculiarity. Against
this we wish to assert with all caution that our conception explains
some strange features in the master's behavior which otherwise would
have remained enigmatical. Leonardo kept a diary; he made entries in his
small hand, written from right to left which were meant only for
himself. It is to be noted that in this diary he addressed himself with
"thou": "Learn from master Lucca the multiplication of roots."[40] "Let
master d'Abacco show thee the square of the circle."[41] Or on the
occasion of a journey he entered in his diary: