1. A psychoanalytic understanding of the desire for knowledge as reflected in Freud's Leonardo da Vinci and a memory of his childhood.
- Author
-
Blass RB
- Subjects
- Austria, History, 15th Century, History, 18th Century, History, 19th Century, Humans, Italy, Libido, Personal Construct Theory, Art history, Drive, Famous Persons, Freudian Theory, Knowledge, Personality Development, Psychoanalytic Interpretation, Sculpture history
- Abstract
The author offers an understanding of the psychoanalytic notion of the desire for knowledge and the possibility of attaining it as it fi nds expression in Freud's Leonardo da Vinci and a memory of his childhood. This understanding has not been explicitly articulated by Freud but may be considered integral to psychoanalysis' Weltanschauung as shaped by Freud's legacy. It emerges through an attempt to explain basic shifts, contradictions, inconsistencies and tensions that become apparent from a close reading of the text of Leonardo. Articulating this implicit understanding of knowledge provides the grounds for a stance on epistemology that is integral to psychoanalysis and relevant to contemporary psychoanalytic concerns on this topic. This epistemology focuses on the necessary involvement of passion, rather than detachment, in the search for knowledge and views the psychoanalytic aim of self-knowledge as a derivative, and most immediate expression, of a broader and more basic human drive to know.
- Published
- 2006
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