them to a blacksmith’s bellows, and pumped them up into a vast malodorous balloon, which quickly filled the forge and drove his bewildered onlookers outside.
Leonardo was brilliant, but he was not infallible. He didn’t invent scissors, the helicopter, or the telescope, as is frequently claimed. He was very bad at math—he only mastered basic geometry and his arithmetic was often wrong. Many of his observations haven’t stood the test of time: He thought the moon’s surface was covered by water, which was why it reflected light from the sun; that the salamander had no digestive organs but survived by eating fire; and that it was a good idea to paint his most ambitious painting,
Leonardo died in France at the age of sixty-seven. The legend has it that his new patron, King Francis I, sat by his bedside, cradling his head as he lay dying. It’s tempting to see this symbolically as the abandoned child finally getting the parental love he never had as a boy. But whatever he lacked, he had more than made up for it. As the king said: “There had never been another man born in the world who knew as much as Leonardo.”
In theorizing about the effects of a difficult childhood, Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) heads the field. He wrote a biography of Leonardo in 1910 based around a childhood memory Leonardo recounts in his notebooks:
While I was in my cradle a kite came down to me, and opened my mouth with its tail, and struck me many times with its tail against my lips.
From this Freud spins an extraordinary tale of repressed memories of the maternal breast, ancient Egyptian symbolism, and the enigmatic Mona Lisa smile—and reaches the conclusion that Leonardo was gay because he was secretly attracted to his mother. This seems a tediously familiar interpretation now but was daringly original at the time. And, as always, Freud does make some good points. Moving on to Leonardo’s relationship with his father, Freud suggests that, much as his father had abandoned him, Leonardo abandoned his “intellectual children”—his paintings—in favor of pure scientific research. Leonardo’s inability to finish anything and his childlike absorption in research are ways of insulating himself from the fear-inducing power of his father.
If Freud felt he had found the key to Leonardo, it’s probably because it was a key issue in Freud’s own life. Freud wasn’t abandoned by his father, but he felt deeply betrayed by him. Jacob Freud was a wool merchant whose business failed when the young Sigmund was only a toddler. This plunged the family into poverty and meant they had to move from the relative comfort of Freiberg, in Moravia, to an overcrowded Jewish enclave in Vienna. As the eldest of eight, Sigmund was exposed to the difficulties that poverty imposed on his parents’ marriage. Young Sigmund resented his father’s mediocrity, his inability to hold down a job, and the fact that he had been married twice before. A precocious reader, he soon found other heroes to act as surrogate fathers: Hannibal, Cromwell, and Napoleon. At the age of ten he was permitted to name his younger brother, and chose Alexander, after Alexander the Great. Later, he would name one of his own sons Oliver, after Oliver Cromwell. In contrast, he adored (and was adored by) his mother, who called him her “darling Sigi” even into his seventies. But this maternal devotion wasn’t without its problems. When he was two and a half years old, “his libido was awakened” by seeing her naked on a train. From this, Freud acquired a lifelong terror of traveling on trains. More important, he experienced firsthand the most notorious of all his theories: the Oedipus complex—the repressed desire to kill one’s father and sleep with one’s mother. For his final Greek exam at school, Freud chose to translate Sophocles’ tragedy
Sex was to dominate Freud’s life, in one way or another, from then on. When he studied medicine at the University of Vienna, his first major research project involved trying to untangle the sex life of the eel. Despite dissecting more than four hundred specimens, he was unable to find any evidence that male eels had testicles. Had he done so, psychoanalysis might never have happened. Frustrated by fish, he turned to neurology and began to formulate the theories that would make him famous. This was important to Freud. As a young medic, he was still preoccupied with the childhood idea of himself as a hero. He told his fiancee, Martha, that he had destroyed fourteen years’ worth of notes, letters, and manuscripts to obscure the details of his life, confound future biographers, and help establish his personal mythology.
It is often claimed, with some justification, that Freud reduced all human psychology to sex, so it is surprising to discover he didn’t lose his virginity until he married at the age of thirty. By his own admission, his sexual activity after marriage was minimal (he was convinced it made him ill). His first crush, at thirty, was on the mother of a friend. He much preferred to keep women at a safe emotional distance: he was twenty-five before he had his first girlfriend. The closest he came to love during his first years at his university was his friendship with another male student, Edward Silberstein. In fact, throughout his life, Freud had friendships with men, which look very much like infatuations or romances. Often, the intimacy would be followed by a dramatic falling-out and the breaking off of all communication. The most famous example of this is his relationship with Carl Jung. In the early days of their relationship they would spend up to thirteen hours a day walking and talking. But mutual paranoia started to creep in. Freud believed that Jung subconsciously wanted to kill him and take his place, and fainted on two separate occasions when Jung started talking about corpses. For his part, Jung suspected he had sexual feelings for Freud. In 1913 their relationship ended in an acrimonious split that left the “brutal, sanctimonious” Jung floundering in a near-psychotic state for the next five years.
For a man who theorized endlessly about the family, Freud was a peculiar and far from attentive father. Rather than talk to his children at meals, he would place his newest archaeological curio in front of his plate and examine it. (He once claimed he read more archaeology than psychology, and his office was stuffed with Neolithic tools, Sumerian seals, Bronze Age goddesses, Egyptian mummy bandages inscribed with spells, erotic Roman charms, luxurious Persian carpets, and Chinese jade lions.) To educate his children about the facts of life, he sent them all to the family pediatrician. He believed so fervently that every son is driven toward deadly competition with his father that his own sons weren’t even allowed to study medicine, let alone psychoanalysis. In contrast, he exhaustively psychoanalyzed his youngest daughter, Anna, who shared with him her sexual fantasies and her forays into masturbation.
Freud suffered throughout his life from depression and paranoia. On the recommendation of his therapist friend Wilhelm Fleiss, he attempted to treat his mood swings with cocaine. Fleiss had elaborated a tenuous theory that every illness, from sexual problems to disease, was determined by the bones and membranes of the nose and that cocaine could alleviate their symptoms. Freud was delighted with his early results, even encouraging his fiancee to take some “to make her strong and give her cheeks a red color.” After a close friend became seriously addicted, he reduced his consumption in favor of cigars, soon developing a twenty-a-day habit. It killed him eventually, but not before he’d suffered the agony of thirty operations for mouth cancer. Eventually, his entire upper jaw and palate on the right side were removed, and his mouth had to be fitted with a plate to allow him to eat and speak. Undeterred, he would lever his mouth open with a clothes peg to wedge a cigar in. He died three weeks after the start of World War II, his doctor easing his passage with massive overdoses of morphine.
In the end, Freud got what he’d craved since his childhood—heroic status and universal fame—but not quite in the way he envisaged. Just as he saw Leonardo’s life as a movement away from the sensuousness of painting to the intellectual stimulus of science, so he was convinced that he was, in psychoanalysis, moving away from the neuroses of art in order to found a brave new science. In truth, while anyone who participates in therapy today owes a great deal to Freud’s methods, his grand theories don’t hold water. He is best read not as an experimental scientist but as a detective novelist who pieces together bits of evidence to come up with a cunning, all-consuming solution. As a psychological storyteller, he has few equals and it’s hard not to regret his decision to turn down Sam Goldwyn’s offer of $100,000 in 1925 to consult on a major Hollywood love story. But our real lives are rarely so neat as the stories we tell about them. As Voltaire once remarked: “Men will always be mad, and those who think they can cure them are the maddest of all.”
Unfortunately, Freud never set down his thoughts on another great genius with a grisly childhood, Isaac Newton (1642–1727). Newton was the son of an illiterate Norfolk yeoman who could not even write his own name and who died four months before his son was born. At birth, according to his own
