Castration Anxiety In Leonardo Da Vinci's Childhood Memory

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Sigmund Freud was one of the most influential figure and authoritative thinker of the 20th century. He is the founder of the psychoanalytic theory which gained popularity among people at that time but was also subject to criticism. Although most people disagreed with Freud and his theory, some aspects of the psychoanalytic theory can be applied in our lives. Among these aspects is the castration anxiety. Castration anxiety is a boy’s fear of losing his genital. This fear occurs because the child thinks that his father will harm his genital organ as a punishment for having sexual desires for his mother. This essay will argue that castration anxiety is correlated with vision in “Leonardo da Vinci and a memory of his childhood” and in ‘The Uncanny” …show more content…

The tail is a symbol for penis and this represents sexual desires that all humans possess. However, Leonardo associated the vulture to his mother. A superficial reading of the text can explain that this association portrays how all babies get pleasure when they suck at their mother’s nipples. Nonetheless, when we read the text in depth, we can come to the conclusion that Leonardo’s memory represents over dependence and eroticization from him to his mother. The question that now arises is why did Leonardo associate the vulture to his …show more content…

Leonardo once read that all vultures were female and they could reproduce without male assistance. He came to the conclusion that he was also a vulture child because in ancient Egypt the mother was represented by the figure of a vulture. Furthermore, he came across the idea of Blessed Virgin and her Child. Leonardo then began to identify himself as the Christ Child because like the Christ Child, he was also brought by a single mother in the absence of his father. This connection made the fantasy more meaningful to him. The theme of seeing and knowing is explicitly revealed in the text. Leonardo read in the books of science about vultures and their reproductive method and he noticed how church fathers were talking about Mary, the virgin, and her son. This enabled him to make a connection between vultures, Christ Child, and his own situation. Hence, in the works of literature he read facts about vultures and the blessed virgin, because of this he was able to relate himself, as he began to think that his mother was like Mary and that she was represented by a

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