Freud - Complete Works (385 page)

Five Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

2237

   Ladies and Gentlemen, from the
intellectual point of view we must, I think, take into account two
special obstacles to recognizing psycho-analytic trains of thought.
In the first place, people are unaccustomed to reckoning with a
strict and universal application of determinism to mental life; and
in the second place, they are ignorant of the peculiarities which
distinguish unconscious mental processes from the conscious ones
that are familiar to us. One of the most widespread resistances to
psycho-analytic work, in the sick and healthy alike, can be traced
to the second of these two factors. People are afraid of doing harm
by psycho-analysis; they are afraid of bringing the repressed
sexual instincts into the patient’s consciousness, as though
that involved a danger of their overwhelming his higher ethical
trends and of their robbing him of his cultural acquisitions.
People notice that the patient has sore spots in his mind, but
shrink from touching them for fear of increasing his sufferings. We
can accept this analogy. It is no doubt kinder not to touch
diseased spots if it can do nothing else but cause pain. But, as we
know, a surgeon does not refrain from examining and handling a
focus of disease, if he is intending to take active measures which
he believes will lead to a permanent cure. No one thinks of blaming
him for the inevitable suffering caused by the examination or for
the reactions to the operation, if only it gains its end and the
patient achieves a lasting recovery as a result of the temporary
worsening of his state. The case is similar with psycho-analysis.
It may make the same claims as surgery: the increase in suffering
which it causes the patient during treatment is incomparably less
than what a surgeon causes, and is quite negligible in proportion
to the severity of the underlying ailment. On the other hand, the
final outcome that is so much dreaded - the destruction of the
patient’s cultural character by the instincts which have been
set free from repression - is totally impossible. For alarm on this
score takes no account of what our experiences have taught us with
certainty - namely that the mental and somatic power of a wishful
impulse, when once its repression has failed, is far stronger if it
is unconscious than if it is conscious; so that to make it
conscious can only be to weaken it. An unconscious wish cannot be
influenced and it is independent of any contrary tendencies,
whereas a conscious one is inhibited by whatever else is conscious
and opposed to it. Thus the work of psycho-analysis puts itself at
the orders of precisely the highest and most valuable cultural
trends, as a better substitute for the unsuccessful repression.

Five Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

2238

   What, then, becomes of the
unconscious wishes which have been set free by psycho-analysis?
Along what paths do we succeed in making them harmless to the
subject’s life? There are several such paths. The most
frequent outcome is that, while the work is actually going on,
these wishes are destroyed by the rational mental activity of the
better impulses that are opposed to them.
Repression
is
replaced by a
condemning judgement
carried out along the
best lines. That is possible because what we have to get rid of is
to a great extent only the consequences arising from earlier stages
of the ego’s development. The subject only succeeded in the
past in repressing the unserviceable instinct because he himself
was at that time still imperfectly organized and feeble. In his
present-day maturity and strength, he will perhaps be able to
master what is hostile to him with complete success.

   A second outcome of the work of
psycho-analysis is that it then becomes possible for the
unconscious instincts revealed by it to be employed for the useful
purposes which they would have found earlier if development had not
been interrupted. For the extirpation of the infantile wishful
impulses is by no means the ideal aim of development. Owing to
their repressions, neurotics have sacrificed many sources of mental
energy whose contributions would have been of great value in the
formation of their character and in their activity in life. We know
of a far more expedient process of development, called
‘
sublimation
’, in which the energy of the
infantile wishful impulses is not cut off but remains ready for use
- the unserviceable aim of the various impulses being replaced by
one that is higher, and perhaps no longer sexual. It happens to be
precisely the components of the
sexual
instinct that are
specially marked by a capacity of this kind for sublimation, for
exchanging their sexual aim for another one which is comparatively
remote and socially valuable. It is probable that we owe our
highest cultural successes to the contributions of energy made in
this way to our mental functions. Premature repression makes the
sublimation of the repressed instinct impossible; when the
repression is lifted, the path to sublimation becomes free once
more.

Five Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

2239

   We must not omit to consider the
third of the possible outcomes of the work of psycho-analysis. A
certain portion of the repressed libidinal impulses has a claim to
direct satisfaction and ought to find it in life. Our civilized
standards make life too difficult for the majority of human
organizations. Those standards consequently encourage the retreat
from reality and the generating of neuroses, without achieving any
surplus of cultural gain by this excess of sexual repression. We
ought not to exalt ourselves so high as completely to neglect what
was originally animal in our nature. Nor should we forget that the
satisfaction of the individual’s happiness cannot be erased
from among the aims of our civilization. The plasticity of the
components of sexuality, shown by their capacity for sublimation,
may indeed offer a great temptation to strive for still greater
cultural achievements by still further sublimation. But, just as we
do not count on our machines converting more than a certain
fraction of the heat consumed into useful mechanical work, we ought
not to seek to alienate the whole amount of the energy of the
sexual instinct from its proper ends. We cannot succeed in doing
so; and if the restriction upon sexuality were to be carried too
far it would inevitably bring with it all the evils of
soil-exhaustion.

   It may be that you for your part
will regard the warning with which I close as an exaggeration. I
shall only venture on an indirect picture of my conviction by
telling you an old story and leaving you to make what use you like
of it. German literature is familiar with a little town called
Schilda, to whose inhabitants clever tricks of every possible sort
are attributed. The citizens of Schilda, so we are told, possessed
a horse with whose feats of strength they were highly pleased and
against which they had only one objection - that it consumed such a
large quantity of expensive oats. They determined to break it of
this bad habit very gently by reducing its ration by a few stalks
every day, till they had accustomed it to complete abstinence. For
a time things went excellently: the horse was weaned to the point
of eating only one stalk a day, and on the succeeding day it was at
length to work without any oats at all. On the morning of that day
the spiteful animal was found dead; and the citizens of Schilda
could not make out what it had died of.

  
We
should be inclined to
think that the horse was starved and that no work at all could be
expected of an animal without a certain modicum of oats.

   I must thank you for your
invitation and for the attention with which you have listened to
me.

2240

LEONARDO DA VINCI AND A MEMORY OF HIS CHILDHOOD

(1910)

2241

Intentionally left blank

2242

LEONARDO DA VINCI AND A MEMORY OF HIS CHILDHOOD

I

When psychiatric research, normally content to
draw on frailer men for its material, approaches one who is among
the greatest of the human race, it is not doing so for the reasons
so frequently ascribed to it by laymen. ‘To blacken the
radiant and drag the sublime into the dust’ is no part of its
purpose, and there is no satisfaction for it in narrowing the gulf
which separates the perfection of the great from the inadequacy of
the objects that are its usual concern. But it cannot help finding
worthy of understanding everything that can be recognized in those
illustrious models, and it believes there is no one so great as to
be disgraced by being subject to the laws which govern both normal
and pathological activity with equal cogency.

   Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) was
admired even by his contemporaries as one of the greatest men of
the Italian renaissance; yet in their time he had already begun to
seem an enigma, just as he does to us to-day. He was a universal
genius ‘whose outlines can only be surmised, - never
defined’.¹ In his own time his most decisive influence
was in painting, and it was left to us to recognize the greatness
of the natural scientist (and engineer) that was combined in him
with the artist. Though he left behind him masterpieces of
painting, while his scientific discoveries remained unpublished and
unused, the investigator in him never in the course of his
development left the artist entirely free, but often made severe
encroachments on him and perhaps in the end suppressed him. In the
last hour of his life, according to the words that Vasari gives
him, he reproached himself with having offended God and man by his
failure to do his duty in his art.² And even if this story of
Vasari’s has neither external nor much internal probability
but belongs to the legend which began to be woven around the
mysterious Master even before his death, it is still of
incontestable value as evidence of what men believed at the
time.

  
¹
The words are Jacob Burckhardt’s,
quoted by Konstantinowa (1907).

  
²
‘Egli per reverenza, rizzatosi a
sedere sul letto, contando il mal suo e gli accidenti di quello,
mostrava tuttavia quanto avea offeso Dio e gli uomini del mondo,
non avendo operato nell’ arte come si conveniva.’
[‘He having raised himself out of reverence so as to sit on
the bed, and giving an account of his illness and its
circumstances, yet showed how much he had offended God and mankind
in not having worked at his art as he should have done.’]
Vasari.

Leonardo Da Vinci And A Memory Of His Childhood

2243

   What was it that prevented
Leonardo’s personality from being understood by his
contemporaries? The cause of this was certainly not the versatility
of his talents and the range of his knowledge, which enabled him to
introduce himself to the court of the Duke of Milan, Lodovico
Sforza, called Il Moro, as a performer on a kind of lute of his own
invention, or allowed him to write the remarkable letter to the
same duke in which he boasted of his achievements as architect and
military engineer. For the days of the renaissance were quite
familiar with such a combination of wide and diverse abilities in a
single individual - though we must allow that Leonardo himself was
one of the most brilliant examples of this. Nor did he belong to
the type of genius who has received a niggardly outward endowment
from nature, and who in his turn places no value on the outward
forms of life, but in a spirit of painful gloom flies from all
dealings with mankind. On the contrary, he was tall and well
proportioned; his features were of consummate beauty and his
physical strength unusual; he was charming in his manner, supremely
eloquent, and cheerful and amiable to everyone. He loved beauty in
the things that surrounded him; he was fond of magnificent clothing
and valued every refinement of living. In a passage from the
treatise on painting, which reveals his lively capacity for
enjoyment, he compares painting with its sister arts and describes
the hardships that await the sculptor: ‘For his face is
smeared and dusted all over with marble powder so that he looks
like a baker, and he is completely covered with little chips of
marble, so that it seems as if his back had been snowed on; and his
house is full of splinters of stone and dust. In the case of the
painter it is quite different... for the painter sits in front of
his work in perfect comfort. He is well-dressed and handles the
lightest of brushes which he dips in pleasant colours. He wears the
clothes he likes; and his house is full of delightful paintings,
and is spotlessly clean. He is often accompanied by music or by men
who read from a variety of beautiful works, and he can listen to
these with great pleasure and without the din of hammers and other
noises.’¹

  
¹
Trattato della Pittura
.

Leonardo Da Vinci And A Memory Of His Childhood

2244

   It is indeed quite possible that
the idea of a radiantly happy and pleasure-loving Leonardo is only
applicable to the first and longer period of the artist’s
life. Afterwards, when the downfall of Lodovico Moro’s rule
forced him to leave Milan, the city that was the centre of his
activity and where his position was assured, and to pursue a life
lacking in security and not rich in external successes, until he
found his last asylum in France, the sparkle of his temperament may
have grown dim and some strange sides of his nature may have been
thrown into prominence. Moreover the turning of his interests from
his art to science, which increased as time went on, must have
played its part in widening the gulf between himself and his
contemporaries. All the efforts in which in their opinion he
frittered away his time when he could have been industriously
painting to order and becoming rich (as, for example, his former
fellow-student Perugino did) seemed to them to be merely capricious
trifling or even caused him to be suspected of being in the service
of the ‘black art’. We are in a position to understand
him better, for we know from his notes what were the arts that he
practised. In an age which was beginning to replace the authority
of the Church by that of antiquity and which was not yet familiar
with any form of research not based on presuppositions, Leonardo -
the forerunner and by no means unworthy rival of Bacon and
Copernicus - was necessarily isolated. In his dissection of the
dead bodies of horses and human beings, in his construction of
flying machines, and in his studies on the nutrition of plants and
their reactions to poisons, he certainly departed widely from the
commentators on Aristotle, and came close to the despised
alchemists, in whose laboratories experimental research had found
some refuge at least in those unfavourable times.

Leonardo Da Vinci And A Memory Of His Childhood

2245

   The effect that this had on his
painting was that he took up his brush with reluctance, painted
less and less, left what he had begun for the most part unfinished
and cared little about the ultimate fate of his works. And this was
what he was blamed for by his contemporaries: to them his attitude
towards his art remained a riddle.

   Several of Leonardo’s later
admirers have made attempts to acquit his character of the flaw of
instability. In his defence they claim that he is blamed for what
is a general feature of great artists: even the energetic
Michelangelo, a man entirely given up to his labours, left many of
his works incomplete, and it was no more his fault than it was
Leonardo’s in the parallel instance. Moreover, in the case of
some of the pictures, they urge, it is not so much a question of
their being unfinished as of his declaring them to be so. What
appears to the layman as a masterpiece is never for the creator of
the work of art more than an unsatisfactory embodiment of what he
intended; he has some dim notion of a perfection, whose likeness
time and again he despairs of reproducing. Least of all, they
claim, is it right to make the artist responsible for the ultimate
fate of his works.

   Valid as some of these excuses
may be, they still do not cover the whole state of affairs that
confronts us in Leonardo. The same distressing struggle with a
work, the final flight from it and the indifference to its future
fate may recur in many other artists, but there is no doubt that
this behaviour is shown in Leonardo in an extreme degree. Solmi
(1910, 12) quotes the remark of one of his pupils: ‘Pareva
che ad ogni ora tremasse, quando si poneva a dipingere, e
però non diede mai fine ad alcuna cosa cominciata,
considerando la grandezza dell’arte, tal che egli scorgeva
errori in quelle cose, che ad altri parevano miracoli.’¹
His last pictures, he goes on, the Leda, the Madonna di Sant’
Onofrio, Bacchus, and the young St. John the Baptist, remained
unfinished ‘come quasi intervenne di tutte le cose
sue . . .’² Lomazzo, who made a copy of
the Last Supper, refers in a sonnet to Leonardo’s notorious
inability to finish his works:

                                               
Protogen che il pennel di sue pitture

                                               
Non levava, agguaglio il Vinci Divo

                                               
Di cui opra non è finita pure.
³

  
¹
[‘He appeared to tremble the whole
time when he set himself to paint, and yet he never completed any
work he had begun, having so high a regard for the greatness of art
that he discovered faults in things that to others seemed
miracles.’]

  
²
[‘As happened more or less to all his
works.’]

  
³
[‘Protogenes, who never lifted his
brush from his work, was the equal of the divine Vinci, who never
finished anything at all.’] Quoted by Scognamiglio
(1900).

Leonardo Da Vinci And A Memory Of His Childhood

2246

   The slowness with which Leonardo
worked was proverbial. He painted at the Last Supper in the Convent
of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan, after the most thorough
preparatory studies, for three whole years. One of his
contemporaries, Matteo Bandelli, the story-writer, who at the time
was a young monk in the convent, tells how Leonardo often used to
climb up the scaffolding early in the morning and remain there till
twilight never once laying his brush aside, and with no thought of
eating or drinking. Then days would pass without his putting his
hand to it. Sometimes he would remain for hours in front of the
painting, merely examining it in his mind. At other times he would
come straight to the convent from the court in the castle at Milan,
where he was making the model of the equestrian statue for
Francesco Sforza, in order to add a few strokes of the brush to a
figure, and then immediately break off.¹ According to Vasari
he spent four years in painting the portrait of Mona Lisa, the wife
of the Florentine Francesco del Giocondo, without being able to
bring it to final completion. This circumstance may also account
for the fact that the picture was never delivered to the man who
commissioned it, but instead remained with Leonardo and was taken
to France by him.² It was bought by King Francis I, and to-day
forms one of the greatest treasures of the Louvre.

   If these reports of the way in
which Leonardo worked are compared with the evidence of the
extraordinarily numerous sketches and studies which he left behind
him and which exhibit every
motif
appearing in his paintings
in a great variety of forms, we are bound totally to reject the
idea that traits of hastiness and unsteadiness acquired the
slightest influence over Leonardo’s relation to his art. On
the contrary, it is possible to observe a quite extraordinary
profundity, a wealth of possibilities between which a decision can
only be reached with hesitation, demands which can hardly be
satisfied, and an inhibition in the actual execution which is not
in fact to be explained even by the artist inevitably falling short
of his ideal. The slowness which had all along been conspicuous in
Leonardo’s work is seen to be a symptom of this inhibition
and to be the forerunner of his subsequent withdrawal from
painting.³ It was this too which determined the fate of the
Last Supper - a fate that was not undeserved. Leonardo could not
become reconciled to fresco painting, which demands rapid work
while the ground is still moist, and this was the reason why he
chose oil colours, the drying of which permitted him to protract
the completion of the painting to suit his mood and leisure. These
pigments however detached themselves from the ground on which they
were applied and which separated them from the wall. Added to this,
the defects in the wall, and the later fortunes of the building
itself, determined what seems to be the inevitable ruin of the
picture.
⁴

  
¹
Von Seidlitz (1909,
1
,
203).

  
²
Von Seidlitz (1909,
2
,
48).

  
³
Pater: ‘But it is certain that at one
period of his life he had almost ceased to be an
artist.’