Critical Essay | Critical Essay by John O’Neill

Critical Essay by John O’Neill

SOURCE: “Leonardo's Love of Knowledge: Freud's Passion for Error,” in Freud and the Passions, The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996, pp. 181-99.

In the following essay, O’Neill points out the similarities between Leonardo and Freud and contends that Freud's “overexcitement” for his methodology, that is, for imposing sexual psychoanalytic theory onto Leonardo's “sketchy” biography, resulted in errors in Freud's interpretation.

Man hat geforscht, anstatt zu leben.

—Freud

Freud may not have been a passionate man but he was certainly a man of many passions. Such a distinction, of course, results from Freud's persistent self-analysis, at least as much from his sexual ambivalence (O’Neill 1992c). From his earliest childhood, he had learned that we may well hate those whom we love, lie to those whom we owe the truth, and make ourselves quite ill with jealousy, anger, and ambition. Indeed, if Freud seems to have rendered childhood more theatrical than...
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