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Article: Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood
- Article from:
- International Dictionary of Psychoanalysis
- Author:
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LEONARDO DA VINCI AND A MEMORY OF HIS CHILDHOOD
This monograph on Leonardo da Vinci was the first of this kind written by Freud, and he had great reservations about it. There were precedents, however: Isidor Sadger had written several histories of artists with pathologies (Conrad-Ferdinand Meyer, Nikolas Lenau, Heinrich von Kleist). For years Freud had been interested in Leonardo da Vinci (see his letter to Wilhelm Fliess of October 9, 1898) and identified with Leonardo's passion for investigation and the nature of his research, which created a scandal at the time. Leonardo da Vinci and his ilk
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Francis Bacon, Nicolas Copernicus, Bernard Palissy
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are heroes of scientific ...