We can only hope that, some day, someone will take one of our childhood memories about a bird and write a whole book about how it proves we were gay and explains our actions. Actually, though, take it with a grain of salt and there's a lot of great ideas in here. Also, Freud may have stolen the Constitution. ( )

When Freud seizes upon a mistranslated infantile memory of Leonardo’s, his juices get flowing, and concludes mistakenly that da Vinci was a repressed homosexual. For as much as he found neurosis and hysteria in almost every person he encountered, one wonders if he pointed that psychoanalytic finger at himself.

An interesting book... but freudian psychology is losing its relevance today and hence, this book merely fulfilled my curiosity, not the appetite for a good read ( )

Fantastic. Brilliant. Great insight into both greats: Freud & Da Vinci. ( )

In which Sigmund attempts to analyse Leonardo's character from examination of a relatively small number of biographical facts. I'm not qualified to say where it figures in Freud's work on the whole, but taken on its own terms it's a extraordinarily ambitious piece, and, in its way, a fascinating read. Unfortunately much emphasis is placed on a story Leonardo tells of a vulture waggling its tail in his mouth when he was an infant. Freud takes it as read that this is either a dream or a fantasy, and proceeds to give a virtuoso display of what it might symbolise. Unfortunately, as I daresay every modern edition makes clear in its introduction, this vulture only exists in a mistranslation from which Freud was working. Leonardo writes instead of a kite. Freud comes similarly unstuck when analysing a Leonardo anatomical drawing of a man and woman engaged in intercourse, taking it for an original when it is in fact a copy, and thus considering things significant which Leonardo didn't really draw at all. These mistakes don't negate *everything* that Freud says--and indeed I've seen it said that they give this work a unique significance in Freud's output, since it's one of the rare occasions when we can say beyond all doubt that he is wrong--but they damage a fair chunk of it, and they do make one wonder about Freud's method generally, which so often consists of building rather grand and widely significant theories on exceptionally slender factual foundations.

So the book needs to be approached with a healthy dose of skepticism, but its ambition makes it an interesting and entertaining read (and not just for students of psychoanalysis or art).

My old Pelican edition also includes a lengthy introduction by James Farrell; I've only glanced through it, but it looks quite interesting in its own right. ( )