part0022

TO make this point more clear let us turn to Leonardo da Vinci. The critical event in his early memory (as Freud and Neumann [1] have written) was indeed the bird that descended to him in the cradle. Leonardo lived with his grandmother and with two successive stepmothers; his natural mother married again and seems to have disappeared from Leonardo’s life. Leonardo has a fantasy, which he recounts as if it were an actual memory from infancy, that a nibio, opened his mouth with its tail and struck him many times upon his lips. This bird was not a vulture, as Freud and then Neumann have declared. Neumann, despite noticing that a nibio is not a vulture and so correcting Freud’s error, nonetheless sustains it by retaining the mistranslation as symbolically correct in order to analyze, along with Freud, Leonardo in terms of the mother-complex. [2]

No. The bird, which came to Leonardo in his vision, was a kite, a relative of the hawk and like it a variety of the genus falconidae. (Hawk is the wider term, kite one of its varieties.) We have here to do with a symbol that can best be amplified from Egypt where Freud turned for his symbolic equation vulture = mother. But it is now the equation: hawk, kite, falcon = Horus = puer. The solar hawk descended upon the Kings at their coronation and was a spirit-soul (ka ), and the hawk in a series of other contexts is a puer emblem par excellence. [3]

Because of the specific puer significance of this bird, the dual mother theme in Leonardo, on which Freud and Neumann base their interpretative case of his genius, may rather, and more correctly, be understood in terms of a discontinuity in the mother relation owing to the early intervention of the puer archetype in its apparition as a kite and which Leonardo kept as a valued memory. (I have not examined the biographical material enough to tell whether the intervention of the nibio image occurred precisely at a time between two of his many mothers. But I do not think the literal aspect of discontinuity is as important as are the two factors: the intervention of the puer and the discontinuity in mothers.)

Leonardo’s interest in flying, his love of birds, as well as his supposed vegetarianism and homosexuality, may thus have a “hawk” in the background rather than a “vulture” and may be grasped as part of puer phenomenology rather than as a mother-complex. The various usages of the word “kite” in English emphasize the puer implications. A kite is a flying, triangular, light framed toy, a favorite of small boys, and a kite is “one who preys upon others.” The term refers also to the highest sails of a ship which are set only in a light wind.

Moreover, the “case” of Leonardo seems paradigmatic for both archetypal psychology in general and the psychology of genius in particular. By ignoring the true significance of an image (in this case the hawk-falcon-kite), one can attribute a crucial event of any life wrongly to an inappropriate archetypal constellation. Then genius is not viewed authentically in terms of the spirit and its early call but is rather attributed to peculiarities in the fate of the mother. Because the vulture-or-kite quarrel stands for the conflict in perspectives between mother and puer, we can see how important an investment early psychoanalysis had in the mother archetype and how there was a consequent misperception and repression of the puer which is only now beginning to be revalued … A lesson we may draw from the Dionysus and the Leonardo examples is that what we see is determined by how we look, which is in turn determined by where we stand.

2 Neumann, “Leonardo,” 14: “Against the background of archetypal relations, the bird of Leonardo’s childhood fantasy, considered in its creative uroboric unity of breast-mother and phallus-father, is symbolically a ‘vulture’ even if Leonardo called it a ‘nibio’ … For this reason we are perfectly justified in retaining the term ‘vulture’, which Freud chose ‘by mistake,’ for it was through this very ‘blunder’ that his keen intuition penetrated to the core of the matter …” (i.e., “the symbolic equation vulture = mother” [7]).
This vulture was “seen” by Oskar Pfister in Leonardo’s painting of St. Anne with Virgin and Christ Child as a negative form in the blue cloth that drapes and links the figures. Jung too “saw” a vulture in that painting. In a letter to Freud of 17 June 1909, Jung writes that he has seen a vulture (Geier in German) in a different place from the one seen by Pfister. Jung’s vulture has its “beak precisely in the pubic region.”
Strachey, who edited Freud’s works for the Standard Edition, said the hidden vulture idea must be abandoned in the light of the kite-hawk-falcon (nibio) which was Leonardo’s actual bird. But Neumann responds to this by saying that, in Pfister, Freud, and in Leonardo too, “the symbolic image of the Great Mother proved stronger than the actual image of the ‘kite’" (SE 11: 64–66). The power of the archetypal image of the Great Mother certainly dominated the psychoanalytic interpretation in all these commentators, but this does not establish that it also dominated Leonardo in the same way.
For a succinct devastation of Freud’s Leonardo thesis, based on the vulture-kite confusion, see D. E. Stannard, Shrinking History: On Freud and the Failure of Psychohistory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 5–21.