The Uncanny

The second section for Freud’s essay on da Vinci is concerned with a bizarre childhood memory of da Vinci’s concerning a vulture, which recalls an example given in “Screen Memories,” Freud’s 1909 essay:

It seems that I was predestined to study the vulture thoroughly, because I recall, as a very early memory, that when I was still in my cradle a vulture came down to me, opened my mouth with its tail and struck me many times with its tail against my lips (60).

Freud now reiterates his earlier claim about childhood memories in even stronger terms. Da Vinci’s vulture memory seems so improbable that it is an excellent example of the fantastical nature of many childhood memories; Freud writes that such memories “are altered, falsified, and made to serve later preoccupations” (60). Freud compares the motive for remembering childhood memories with that of recording national history, with both being “not objective curiosity, but a desire for influencing contemporaries” (61). Yet Freud does not reject these fantasies due to their lack of objectivity, saying that “[h]idden behind these residual memories, which [the person] himself does not understand, there are as a rule priceless pieces of evidence about the most significant features of his mental development” (62).

Freud subjects Leonardo’s vulture fantasy to psychoanalysis. The tail, or coda, is a synonym for the male organ, thus the image becomes one of fellatio, but also of suckling the breast. Freud speculates about da Vinci’s possible homosexuality. The vulture remains an unlikely element in the fantasy. Freud notes a “remote” (64) connection between the Egyptian goddess Mut, represented by a vulture hieroglyph, and the German word for mother, “mutter.” Though Francois Champollion (1790-1832) was the first European to decode the hieroglyphs, da Vinci “may well have known the scholarly fable that caused the ancient Egyptians to use the image of the vulture to represent the concept ‘mother’ […] we can scarcely overestimate the extent of his reading” (65).

The fantasy makes more sense with the vulture parable’s inclusion of the idea that the creatures were capable of virgin birth and da Vinci’s own illegitimacy. Leonardo spent the first years of his life with his poor biological mother, and without his father, since Leonardo’s father married another woman in the same year of da Vinci’s birth. This, Freud concludes, “must have had the most decisive influence on the shaping of his inner life” (67). Finally, Freud links da Vinci’s enquiry into aviation with his “infantile sexual researches” (67).