Brain Pain discussion

This discussion covers Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of his Childhood, p. 43 – 120

Wow. Halfway into this, I can say this is the most whackadoodle thing by Freud I've encountered yet. It's surely entertaining reading, which is not to say that it represents sound thinking at all. But I'm having fun reading it. Freud's ideas have a sort of appeal, it's just so audacious of him to present his musings as though they were a reliable guide to the character, thought-processes, and actual life history of a long deceased Leonardo. Was any of this included in the Da Vinci Code? Freud's probably a more fanciful fantasist and paranoid writer than Mr. Brown.

I'm on part III and yeah, it's a bit nutty. The introduction to my copy (The Freud Reader, I think from W W Norton) mentions that Freud came up with this whole latent-childhood-homosexuality thing after reflecting on his own childhood "intimate friendship" with another boy.

My favorite passage by far is this one:

The inclination to take a man's sexual organ into the mouth and suck at it, which in respectable society is considered a loathsome perversion, is nevertheless found with great frequency among women of today.

Poor, poor Sigmund.

Hehe.

I'm tempted to say that, if I were convinced that this was a work of fiction, and if Freud were a fictional character, I'd find it brilliant--and I'd suppose it was written by Nabokov.

As it is, his theorizing in this article could be blasted apart in ten-thousand ways. His chain of logic consists of many fragile links, every one of which must hold the full weight of his conclusions. It makes me think of betting on a parlay, in which, even if we're 90% sure of winning each individual bet, if we need to win six bets in a row, we'll probably fail. But I don't have such a degree of certainty that, for instance, Da Vinci knew of the legend that vultures are all female and they're impregnated by the wind, that some woman whose funeral he paid for was likely to be his peasant mother, that an analysis of Egyptian etymologies has anything to do with anything, that it even makes sense to suppose a bird's tail indicates a suppressed homosexual attraction to one's mother's penis(!), and that any and all of this, even were it proven beyond a doubt, would in any way account for Mona Lisa's mysterious smile or Leonardo's fascination with animal anatomy.

I mean...

Here's a good quote, revealing what Freud takes for persuasive evidence (regarding Caterina being Leonardo's long lost mother come to meet him and to meet her death):

"This interpretation by a psychological novelist is not susceptible of proof, but it can lay claim to such inner probability, and is so much in keeping with whatever else we know about Leonardo's emotional life, that I cannot forbear to accept it as correct."

It seems clear that, even if some proof could be presented that Caterina were not Leonardo's mother or relation, or even that his mother died in childbirth and his father was always present in his life, Freud would be unfazed and could find another way to reach the same conclusions.

Yeah, the tail-as-penis theory is quite ridiculous. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and all that.

It strikes me that the entire purpose of this essay for Freud was to identify what drives an individual to do research (since, as he says early on, artistic creativity is beyond the grasp of analysis). He lays out three personality types (low, medium, high curiosity?) in an attempt to codify this impulse.

The structure sort of works and it sort of doesn't. There are incurious people who never learn a thing once they've left school; likewise, there are people who never stop learning. But it is quite common to find, among researchers, people who continue to learn in the area of their research, but not in general. There are also the ones who "peak early", doing most of their original work early in their career and then spending the rest of their years refining it.

I'll have to re-read that section, as I was a bit stupified by the earlier parts of the essay when I read it. There may be some merit to the categorization of the research impulse, though the reasons he ascribes to it are downright laughable.

Again, Freud shows an ability to look critically at some of his claims as a supposed hostile reader might, and thus he anticipates objections and tries to reframe his statements, or qualifies them, without allowing them to sway him from his convictions. He does this, for instance, when he makes grand sweeping and possibly offensive statements about the nature and causes of homosexuality, but then limits his claims to what he'd like to define as only a particular kind of homosexuality.

He even anticipated my comparing him to a fiction writer.

I wanted to challenge him on such fundamental questions of why one person would go one way, and another person another way, when experiencing similar influences in early childhood. He writes that out of the scope of his investigation, attributing it (and perhaps fairly) to chance.

I wanted to ask why Freud would dwell on so many generalizations and universal phenomena when supposedly attempting to account for what makes Da Vinci distinct, rather than typical. But he knows he can't account for everything that is particular to the individual.

And he writes himself an out when he says that, if there is an error in his analysis, it must be due to errors by Da Vinci's biographers and a lack of sufficient data, while precluding the possibility that there could be any flaw in his own methods. Thus he plays the kind of psych games that fortune-tellers employ.

I can never quite get over the shock I experienced when reading Freud's Interpretation of Dreams--a mostly persuasive text--when Freud propped up his claim that ALL dreams are wish fulfillments by stating that, if ever a patient has a dream that is NOT a wish-fulfillment, it must be a fulfillment of their wish to prove him wrong! And thus he's right.

Well, he doesn't go quite so far here, but...

And yet I still value this essay, beyond its entertainment value and as a source of ideas to speculate on. So much of what Freud has propounded comes together in one (mad) essay. And somehow through time I've come to accept many of Freud's suppositions--not all, but some--and now they're brought together again to compel a new evaluation of his whole package.

Among the things that I've largely come to accept, and I think society has largely absorbed into its thinking, are: man has an unconscious mind that exercises profound influence on behavior, belief, and conscious thought; we can experience internal conflicts within our minds; mental illness or neurosis can arise from such conflicts, which we may be largely unaware of or in denial of, and which may be outside of our control; that personality can be formed early, and that it's resistant to change in later years, so much so that a man may not feel he is truly master of himself; that dreams, daydreams, and fragmentary and peculiar "memories" can contain coded or symbolic clues to a fantasy, thought, or experience; that our primary relationships to parents and siblings can profoundly affect our character and relationships to others throughout our lives; that children are not innocent of sexual thoughts and curiosities, and they do not live idyllic worry-free lives as we would wish to believe, but rather they largely want to grow up and get some power and independence in their lives; and more and more and more.

Freud influenced us to accept such ideas, and may have innovated several of these ideas. And yet he seems so madly carried away with them at times!

Let's not forgot "homosexuality is an expression of the disgust with female genitalia due to the belief that the vagina is a wound that remains after the woman's penis has been removed."

There's somebody with a fixation here all right, and it ain't Freud's patients.

Finally finished the essay.

OK, so let me get this straight (ha!). All dreams of flying are substitutes for another desire. The effortlessness and the lack of obstacles in dream-flying are irrelvant because we know from previous research by Freud that flying is associated with the penis. This research includes the drawing of penises (penii?) with wings by ancients (I think he means the caduceus here), some German slang for intercourse, and some Italian slang for male genitals. Because of this, dreams of flying are masking a desire for sex.

Also, children are obsessed with genitals. Sure, they may be play-acting about what they will be when they grow up (soldier, fireman, accountant), but that is just a cover for what they really want to do when they grow up: have lots of sex with all sorts of genitals (or just penises; Freud gets a little vague here). Therefore, everything that a person remembers about childhood must be interpreted as a manifestation of an obsession with genitals (the child's, not Freud's).

Mkfs wrote: "Finally finished the essay.

OK, so let me get this straight (ha!). All dreams of flying are substitutes for another desire. The effortlnessness and the lack of obstacles in dream-flying are irrelv..."

I'm a bit behind in my reading, but I can't wait to read about the flying penisii....

I'm not finished with the chapter but I can see that the conversation will soon be exhausted. Freud has been raked over the coals many times. He fell out of favor about fifty years ago, and only lately seems to be making something of a comeback. But psychohistory or psycho-biography has managed to hold on as a fairly reputable branch of history since the 1930s. Many of the historians used the same techniques as Freud, which admittedly seem farfetched, but given that they're using Freud's basic theories what else can they be? Of course it's all speculative. The historians and Freud are reaching back over centuries to extract the thoughts and memories usually provided by a live person on a couch. If you don’t accept Freud’s basic theories on psychosexual development, dreams, etc., you’re certainly not going to accept them as applied to a person six centuries dead. But I don’t think that his speculations about da Vinci are harebrained. He’s trying to solve a mystery (let’s say why da Vinci didn’t finish his works), and he pieces together the pieces of the puzzle logically, if it is the logic of psychoanalysis. He finds a fact that’s “uncanny,” and then tries to render it explicable (I read the last chapter first). This seems to me what the entire book is about. But Zadignose's point about it being easier to accept as fiction, is exactly right. I think Freud knew he was writing fiction. He constructs his story just the way a writer of fiction would.

Alex wrote: "He’s trying to solve a mystery (let’s say why da Vinci didn’t finish his works), and he pieces together the pieces of the puzzle logically, if it is the logic of psychoanalysis. He finds a fact that’s “uncanny,” and then tries to render it explicable. "

There is some good stuff in this essay. It seems like Freud was trying to determine "what causes people to be curious", e.g. in regards to the origins of the research mindset.

The notion of psychobiography is interesting, but ultimately no different from what could be called character-driven biography : where the biographer tries to convey something of what the subject was thinking and feeling (Freud was not too successful in this regard). Anything more than this, on a historical figure, is subject to overreach.


In the case of da Vinci, Freud's methods are exactly what I have a problem with. This isn't analysis; this is cherry-picking data. One is not left with the impression that Freud analyzed all of the data there was about da Vinci, and these are his conclusions. Instead, it seems that one or two details triggered Freud's monomania (childhood penis issues) and he then went to great, almost Jungian, lengths to prove his case. Of course, Freud takes pains not to commit to the results -- probably because at some level, he knows he's wrong.

Ultimately, I think the essay would work better if this was a case-study presented by Freud as an example of how *not* to apply his method. Given that Freud himself was unhappy with this essay, that might not be terribly inaccurate.

But your "cherry-picking" to me is Freud following the analytical paths he developed in psychoanalysis. Of course it is similar to conventional biography, and he may well have not analyzed "all the data," but all the data that his discipline required. The idea that he backpedals to ward off critics evades the obvious: Freud is uncertain that's he's correct. As to childhood penis issues... I have twin sons. One son has two boys, a twelve year old and a six year old. My other son has a six-month-old daughter. The six year old recently saw the daughter's diaper being changed. he immediately asked his father, "Where is her doodle?" My son explained she was a girl and didn't have one. Yesterday all the grandchildren were at my house and the girl was "playing" with a Baby Ricky doll, which cries when squeezed. The six year old squeezed Baby Ricky and then was warned by an adult, "be careful 'he' doesn't pee." The six year old almost immediately stuck his hand down the pants of Baby Ricky and found to his puzzlement--nothing. Baby Ricky is not anatomically correct. Later on, we all attended a bris.

Alex wrote: "The six year old recently saw the daughter's diaper being changed. he immediately asked his father, "Where is her doodle?" My son explained she was a girl and didn't have one..."

Sounds pretty normal for a boy growing up without sisters. I guess we won't know for twenty years whether he was traumatized by the experience.

Mkfs wrote: "Alex wrote: "The six year old recently saw the daughter's diaper being changed. he immediately asked his father, "Where is her doodle?" My son explained she was a girl and didn't have one..."

Soun..."

I'm a little late getting back on this... I wasn't thinking about trauma but the next logical step in his thought process. If he had previously believed that all people had penises, then he must have believed that his mother had a penis. How will he sort this out? If he attended a bris (that was a joke, but a joke with a point)he might think that his mother had a penis but it was cut off. Now maybe later on, things are explained to him and he understands them. But for a while there's going to be some turbulence in his mind. Here we return to the screening of memories.