Dr. Jeremy Wasser

This story begins with two of the great masters of the Renaissance: Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo Buonarroti.

On a page in his sketchbook now known as the Codex Atlanticus, Leonardo da Vinci noted down a highly unusual experience. He claimed to remember from when he was a two- to three-year old child a bird landing on his cradle and sticking its tail feathers into his mouth.
In 1505, Pope Julius II commissioned Michelangelo to design and build his planned tomb. The pope died in 1513, long before the work was completed and Michelangelo had, by then, made significant changes to the original massive design. Far fewer than the forty planned statues, were ultimately made but the most famous of these, that of Moses, sits in the church of San Pietro in Vincoli in Rome. Famously, Michelangelo depicted the lawgiver with what appear to be two horns on his head.
About 400 years later, the Viennese neurologist and psychiatrist, Sigmund Freud, applied the principles and techniques of the science and therapeutic technique he invented, psychoanalysis, to da Vinci’s childhood memory and the masterpiece of Michelangelo. In this webinar, I will discuss and analyze the impressively large clinical and historical literature on Freud’s writings on these two subjects. Freud was quite willing to apply psychoanalytic techniques to patients he himself had never had on the famous couch and his work with da Vinci and Michelangelo, while famously wrong in some respects, remains fascinating reading and provides us with unique insights into these two men and, more significantly, into the mind of the father of psychoanalysis himself.