The Uncanny by Sigmund Freud

Author:Sigmund Freud [Freud, Sigmund]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, pdf
Tags: Literary Collections, Essays, Psychology, Movements, Psychoanalysis, Art, Individual Artists, Monographs, Biography & Autobiography, Historical
ISBN: 9780141930503
Google: 8f3-uKZOHekC
Publisher: Penguin UK
Published: 2003-07-31T05:00:00+00:00

II

As far as I know, Leonardo only once includes a piece of information about his childhood in his scientific writings. In a passage dealing with the flight of the vulture he suddenly interrupts himself to pursue a memory from his very early childhood that has sprung to mind.

‘It seems that I was predestined to study the vulture so 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 this tail against my lips.’1 A childhood memory, then, and of an extremely strange kind. Strange on account of its content and of the time of life it is assigned to. Perhaps it is not impossible to remember something that happened when one was still a baby, but it can by no means be regarded as certain. However, what this memory of Leonardo's asserts – that a vulture opened the child's mouth with its tail – sounds so improbable, so fanciful, that a different view of it, one that removed both difficulties at once, would commend itself more to our judgement. According to this view the scene with the vulture is not a memory of Leonardo's, but a fantasy that he conceived at a later date and then transposed into his childhood.2 People's memories of their childhood often have no other origin. Unlike the conscious memories of one's mature years, they are not fixed from the moment of the experience to which they relate and subsequently repeated, but are brought out only later, when childhood is past; in the course of this process they are altered, falsified, and made to serve later preoccupations, so that in general they cannot be strictly distinguished from fantasies. Perhaps one can get the clearest idea of their nature by thinking of how historiography arose among the peoples of the ancient world. So long as a nation was small and weak it did not think of recording its history. The people tilled the soil, defended themselves against their neighbours, tried to win land from them and acquire wealth. This was a heroic, unhistorical age. Then came the dawn of a new age, in which the nation began to reflect and saw itself as rich and powerful; it now felt a need to know where it had come from and how it had evolved. The writing of history, which had begun as a continuous record of current events, now looked back into the past, collected traditions and legends, interpreted remnants of earlier times that survived in customs and usages, and so created a history of the primeval period. Inevitably this primeval history was more an expression of present opinions and wishes than a depiction of the past, for many things had been eliminated from popular memory and others had been distorted. Some traces of the past were misleadingly interpreted in accordance with current ideas. Moreover, the motive behind the writing of history was

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