QI The Book of the Dead

based around a childhood memory Leonardo recounts in his notebooks:
    While I was in my cradle a kite came down to me, and opened my mouth with its tail, and struck me many times with its tail against my lips .
     
    From this Freud spins an extraordinary tale of repressed memories of the maternal breast, ancient Egyptian symbolism and the enigmatic Mona Lisa smile – and reaches the conclusion that Leonardo was gay because he was secretly attracted to his mother. This seems a tediously familiar interpretation now but was daringly original at the time. And, as always, Freud does make some good points. Moving on to Leonardo’s relationship with his father, Freud suggests that, much as his father had abandoned him, Leonardo abandoned his ‘intellectual children’ – his paintings – in favour of pure scientific research. Leonardo’s inability to finish anything and his childlike absorption in research is a way of insulating himself from the fear-inducing power of his father.

    If Freud felt he had found the key to Leonardo, it’s probably because it was a key issue in Freud’s own life. Freud wasn’t abandoned by his father, but he felt deeply betrayed by him. Jacob Freud was a wool merchant whose business failed when the young Sigmund was only a toddler. This plunged the family into poverty and meant they had to move from the relative comfort of Freiberg in Moravia to an overcrowded Jewish enclave in Vienna. As the eldest of eight, Sigmund was exposed to the difficulties that poverty imposed on his parents’ marriage. Young Sigmund resented his father’s mediocrity, his inability to hold down a job, and the fact that he had been married twice before. A precocious reader, he soon found other heroes to act as surrogate fathers: Hannibal, Cromwell and Napoleon. At the age of ten he was permitted to name his younger brother, and chose Alexander, after Alexander the Great. Later, he would name one of his own sons Oliver, after Oliver Cromwell. In contrast, he adored (and was adored by) his mother, who called him her ‘darling Sigi’ even into his seventies. But this maternal devotion wasn’t without its problems. When he was two and a half years old, ‘his libido was awakened’ by seeing her naked on a train. From this, Freud acquired a lifelong terror of travelling on trains. More importantly, he experienced at first hand the most notorious of all his theories – the Oedipus complex: the repressed desire to kill one’s father and sleep with one’s mother. For his final Greek exam at school, Freud chose to translate Sophocles’ tragedy Oedipus Rex .
    Sex was to dominate Freud’s life, in one way or another, from then on. Studying medicine at the University of Vienna, his first major research project involved trying to untangle the sex life of the eel. Despite dissecting more than 400 specimens he wasunable to find any evidence that male eels had testicles. Had he done so, psychoanalysis might never have happened. Frustrated by fish, he turned to neurology and began to formulate the theories that would make him famous. This was important to Freud. As a young medic, he was still preoccupied with the childhood idea of himself as a hero. He told his fiancée, Martha, that he had destroyed fourteen years’ worth of notes, letters and manuscripts to obscure the details of his life, confound future biographers and help establish his personal mythology.
    It is often claimed, with some justification, that Freud reduced all human psychology to sex, so it is surprising to discover he didn’t lose his virginity until he married at the age of thirty. By his own admission, his sexual activity after marriage was minimal (he was convinced it made him ill). His first crush, at thirty, was on the mother of a friend. He much preferred to keep women at a safe emotional distance: he was twenty-five before he had his first girlfriend. The closest he came to love during his first years of university was his friendship with another male student, Edward Silberstein. In fact, throughout his life, Freud had friendships with men, which look very much like infatuations or romances. Often, the intimacy would be followed by a dramatic falling-out and the breaking off of all communication. The most famous example of this is his relationship with Carl Jung. In the early days of their relationship they could spend up to thirteen hours a day walking and talking. But mutual paranoia started to creep in. Freud believed that Jung