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The problems posed by Leonardo’s pathographies written by Freud are examined. The historical path of the problem of the relationship between genius and psychopathology is reconstructed, showing that psychoanalysis fits into a very active vein at the end of the 19th century, expressing different theoretical approaches with which Freud relates. The interest for the problem then continued, with alternate answers, until the current days. The distortions made by Freud in Leonardo’s pathographical description are examined; these distortions are extensively examined by several authors, which, however, is not distant from what Freud implements in his other works, nor from what other pathographists of the time did. It is a common behavior in the history of science and well known in modern epistemology that identifies in the development of theories also the importance of rhetorical tools with which scientists support them. It is emphasized that one cannot read particular psychological aspects in these Freudian behaviors, making in fact a pathography of the author of pathographies, but only lead his work to the coherence of the historical contexts in which he operates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Freud’s lecture given on December 1, 1909, at the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society on Leonardo da Vinci is examined. This lecture is a forerunner of his later article Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of his Childhood (Freud, 1910b). An attempt is made to emphasize the inconsistency between Freud’s hypotheses and the historical data by then at his disposal. Avoiding entering Freud’s vulture slip that many scholars have pointed out and Freud never acknowledged, concerns are expressed about Freud’s required documentation in the field of art history and about the method he employed for the portrayal of Leonardo da Vinci’s personality. It seems that Freud willingly avoided historical data choosing almost entirely to rely on applied psychoanalysis widely employing his own phantasies in attempting to overcome the paucity of knowledge on Leonardo da Vinci’s childhood. Freud himself later acknowledged that his 1910 paper was partly a fictional story along the lines of Mereskovskij’s 1895 book on Leonardo. A crucial inconsistency of this lecture, that will not be amended in his paper of 1910, relates to the fact that Freud changed into a phantasy what Leonardo had reported as a childhood memory. Many scholars have taken for granted this shift so that they talked about Leonardo’s “phantasy” or “dream”. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]