Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of his Childhood : 1910c : Sigmund Freud

INDEX

Publication and availability

Extracts from EDITOR, James Strachey's, NOTE to this text

References – A work in progress JE, September 2026

Citation

-Sigmund Freud, SE XXI p152-153

-Éric Laurent

-Russell Grigg, Dominique Hecq & Craig Smith

-Julia Evans & Seminar IV 28th November 1956

-Siegfried Bernfeld

Four references in Sigmund Freud's texts to shoe fetish

– Alexander Sandor Lorand

– Fetishism : 1927 : Sigmund Freud,  SEXXI p152

– Essay I The Sexual Aberration : 1905 :  Sigmund Freud,  SE VII p155

– Essay II Infantile Sexuality : 1905 : Sigmund Freud, SE VII p195

– Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of his Childhood : 1910c : Sigmund Freud, SE XI p96

Jacques Lacan refers to the foot/shoe fetish

-28^th November 1956 Seminar IV

-5^th December 1956 Seminar IV

-19^th December 1956 Seminar IV (twice)

-16^th January 1957 Seminar IV

-30^th January 1957 Seminar IV

-27th February 1957 Seminar IV

Publication and availability

Translated by Alan Tyson,

Published SE XI p57-137 & pfl Vol 14.

Published, bilingual, by www.Freud2Lacan.com /Freud/Philosophy  (32. Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood (Eine Kindheitserinnerung des Leonardo da Vinci))

***

Extracts from EDITOR's (James Strachey's) NOTE to this text

***

EINE KINDHEITSERINNERUNG DES LEONARDO DA VINCI (SE XI p59-62)

The present translation, with a modified title, 'Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of his Childhood', is an entirely new one by Alan Tyson.

That Freud's interest in Leonardo was of long standing is shown by a sentence in a letter to Fliess of October 9, 1898 (Freud, 1950a, Letter 98), in which he remarked that 'perhaps the most famous left-handed individual was Leonardo, who is not known to have had any love-affairs' .[1] This interest, furthermore, was not a passing one, for we find in Freud's reply to a 'questionnaire' on his favourite books (1907d) that he mentions among them Merezhkovsky's study of Leonardo. But the immediate stimulus to writing the present work appears to have come in the autumn of 1909 from one of his patients who, as he …

[James Strachey's footnote 1] A connection between bilaterality and bisexuality had been asserted by Fliess but questioned by Freud. An indirect reference to this controversy (which was one of the occasions for their estrangement) will be found on SE XI p136 below.] … remarked in a letter to Jung on October 17, seemed to have the same constitution as Leonardo without his genius. He added that he was obtaining a book on Leonardo's youth from Italy. This was the monograph by Scognamiglio referred to on p. 82n. After reading this and some other books on Leonardo, he spoke on the subject to the Vienna Psycho-Analytical Society on December 1 ; but it was not until the beginning of April, 1910, that he finished writing his study. It was published at the end of May.

Freud made a number of corrections and additions in the later issues of the book. Among these may be specially mentioned the short footnote on circumcision (pp. 95-6n), the excerpt from Reitler (pp. 70-2n), and the long quotation from Pfister (pp. 115-16n), all of them added in 1919, and the discussion of the London cartoon (pp. 114-15n), added in 1923.

This work of Freud's was not the first application of the methods of clinical psycho-analysis to the lives of historical figures in the past. Experiments in this direction had already been made by others,  …

[Footnote SE XI p60, The minutes of the Vienna Psycho-Analytical Society (which we are unfortunately precluded from quoting) show that at a meeting on December 11, 1907, Freud made some remarks on the subject of psycho-analytic biography. (Cf. Jones, 1955, 383).]

…Long before this, in fact on June 20, 1898, he had sent Fliess a study of one of C. F. Meyer's short stories, 'Die Richterin', which threw light on its author's early life (Freud, 1950a, Letter 91 [See /3 Sigmund Freud (Index of Sigmund Freud's test)]). But this monograph on Leonardo was not only the first but the last of Freud's large-scale excursions into the field of biography. The book seems to have been greeted with more than the usual amount of disapproval, and Freud was evidently justified in defending himself in advance with the reflections at the beginning of Chapter VI (p. 130)-reflections which have a general application even to-day to the authors and critics of biographies.

…

SE XI p62, And Freud's psychological analysis of the phantasy is not contradicted by this correction but merely deprived of one piece of corroborative support.

Apart, then, from the consequent irrelevance of the Egyptian discussion- though this nevertheless retains much of its independent value-the main body of Freud's study is unaffected by his mistake: the detailed construction of Leonardo's emotional life from his earliest years, the account of the conflict between his artistic and his scientific impulses, the deep analysis of his psychosexual history. And, in addition to this main topic, the study presents us with a number of not less important side-themes: a more general discussion of the nature and workings of the mind of the creative artist, an outline of the genesis of one particular type of homosexuality, and-of special interest to the history of psycho-analytic theory-the first full emergence of the concept of narcissism.

References

A work in progress JE, September 2026

***

General Citation by Sigmund Freud

***

–SE XI p96 & the whole case study

-Fetishism : 1927 : Sigmund Freud, this site  /3 Sigmund Freud (19270101 or Index of Sigmund Freud's texts)],

SE XXI p152-153, In every instance, the meaning and the purpose of the fetish turned out, in analysis, to be the same. It revealed itself so naturally and seemed to me so compelling that I am prepared to expect the same solution in all cases of fetishism. When now I announce that the fetish is a substitute for the penis, I shall certainly create disappointment; so I hasten to add that it is not a substitute for any chance penis, but for a particular and quite special penis that had been extremely important in early childhood but had later been lost. That is to say, it should normally have been given up, but the fetish is precisely designed to preserve it from extinction. To put it more plainly: the fetish is a substitute for the woman's (the mother's) penis that the little boy once believed in and-for reasons familiar to us-does not want to give up.[SE XXI p153 Footnote l]

SE XXI p153 Sigmund Freud's Footnote 1, This interpretation was made as early as 1910, in my study on Leonardo da Vinci, without any reasons being given for it. [SE XI p96]

This reference is cited in Digging down to the origins of Lacan's 'Me, the truth, I speak' 19th June 1968 : 2^nd September 2026 : Julia Evans, this site  /Authors A-Z (Evans)

***

General Citations

***

– The case, from unease to the lie : February 2002 : Éric Laurent,

see this site  /5 Authors A-Z (Laurent)

Freud succeeded in giving a narrative form to structure, freed from the constraints of the ideal. He succeeded in integrating the analytic session – fundamentally knotted in the dis-symmetry between the analyst and the analysand – into one and the same continuous narrative of the subject's dialogue with his unconscious. He also succeeded in transmitting his mode of narration to Abraham and Ferenczi. It can be read in Jensen's Gradiva or in the biographies, turned into novels, of cultural heroes like Mereschkowski's Leonardo da Vinci. Karl Abraham and Otto Rank were very impressed by it.

*

-p11 of Introduction to 'Introduction to Female Sexuality – The early psychoanalytic controversies' : 1999 : Russell Grigg, Dominique Hecq & Craig Smith

See this site  /5 Authors A-Z (Grigg or Index of Authors' texts or https://web.archive.org/web/20210922053541/http://www.lacanianworks.net/?p=12330)

P11 Grigg etc, In 'Some Psychical Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction Between the Sexes' Freud compares male and female infantile sexuality and suggests that penis envy develops into a desire for a child as a substitute penis for little girls, 'and with that purpose in view she takes her father as a love-object. Her mother becomes the object of her jealousy. The girl has turned into a little woman.[17] This is when the castration complex really becomes central to the theory of sexuality, and also when identification becomes central to the whole notion of sexual difference, for identification is increasingly suggested as the process by which the crisis is resolved.[18][17] Psychical consequences, p256. 1925j  SE XIX p241-258. Worth noting is that the question underlying this statement is 'Why does the little girl change love objects?'

See Some Psychical Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction between the Sexes : 1925j : Sigmund Freud, this site  /3 Sigmund Freud (19250101 or Index of Sigmund Freud's texts)

SE XIX p256, So far there has been no question of the Oedipus complex, nor has it up to this point played any part. But now the girl's libido slips into a new position along the line-there is no other way of putting it-of the equation 'penis-child. She gives up her wish for a penis and puts in place of it a wish for a child: and with that purpose in view she takes her father as a love-object. He mother becomes the object of jealousy. The girl has turned into a little woman. If I am to credit a single analytic instance, this new situation can give rise to physical sensations which would have to be regarded as a premature awakening of the female genital apparatus. When the girl's attachment to her father comes to grief later on and has to be abandoned, it may give place to an identification with him and the girl may thus return to her masculinity complex and perhaps remain fixated in it.

[18] page 11, Her mother has become an object of her jealousy. The girl has turned into a little woman. Footnote 18  Identification, though a key concept, is an elusive one. There is, obviously a conceptual difficulty in dealing with the preoedipal mother. This probably makes sense as whether a construct or a fact, motherhood is part of the whole phallic economy. Here lies the conceptual difficulty with the pre-oedipal, rather than oedipal mother. (Contrast with Freud's essay on Leonardo da Vinci.) see Leonardo da Vinci and a memory of his childhood : 1910 : Sigmund Freud, SE XI (this text)

***

SE XI p74-75

***

-in Notes & references for Jacques Lacan's Seminar IV 28^th November 1956 : 2^nd July 2017 : Julia Evans

See this site  /5 Authors A-Z (Evans) or https://web.archive.org/web/20210303212759/http://www.lacanianworks.net/?p=12126

Note, this is one note of many trying to unpack the imagery Jacques Lacan is using and relate it to Sigmund Freud's writings.

Quote from 28^th November 1956,

see Session of Seminar IV : 28^th November 1956 : Jacques Lacan, at /4 Jacques Lacan (19561128 or 19561121 or Index of Jacques Lacan's texts),

28^th November 1956 P7 of EC Translation Group translation,  www.LacanianWorksExchange.net  /Lacan,

It's a little like if someone who managed a hydroelectric plant in the middle of a large river, the Rhine for example, were to demonstrate – in order to understand, to speak of what happens in this machine – that in the machine accumulates[12] that which is the basis for the accumulation of any kind of energy – in this case, this electrical force which can then be distributed and made available to consumers – and that this is, above all, precisely something which has the closest relationship [rapport] to the machine, and that we will say not only nothing more but literally nothing at all in dreaming of the moment when the landscape was still virgin, when the Rhine was flowing

abundantly. But to say that there is something that, in some way, compels us to say the energy was in some sense already there in a virtual state in the current of the river, is to say something that, strictly speaking, means nothing. For the energy only begins to interest us, on this occasion, from the moment when it has accumulated, and it is only accumulated from the moment when the machines are made to work in a certain way, no doubt animated by a thing which is a kind of definitive propulsion which comes from the current of the river. But the reference to the current of the river as being the primitive order of this energy[i] can precisely only come to the mind of someone totally mad, and lead to a notion which is, strictly speaking, of the order of mana[ii] – which concerns something of a very different order than this 'energy', or even 'force' – and who would like to rediscover, in all forces, the permanence of what is eventually accumulated as the element of Wirkung,[iii] a Wirklichkeit made possible by something that would somehow be there for all eternity. In other words, this sort of need of ours to think of, to confuse the Stoff[iv] – or the primitive matter or the impulse or the flow or the inclination – with what is really at stake in the operation of analytic reality, is something which represents nothing less than a misrecognition of the symbolic Wirklichkeit [reality].

Footnote

[12] It has been pointed out that there may be an indirect reference to Wilhelm Reich in these passages, whose distribution of so-called orgone accumulators would lead to his sentencing in 1956 to two years imprisonment on charges of contempt.

Notes [i], [ii], [iii] & [iv] are from Julia Evans' translators notes.'

[i] NOTE, In 5^th December 1956 Seminar IV (paragraph 19), the term 'le génie du courant' is used, the literal translation of which is the 'spirit of the flow'.

It may be slight, but there are some overlaps with the images used by Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan.

An example from, this text, Leonardo da Vinci and a memory of his childhood : 1910 : Sigmund Freud : translated by Alan Tyson :  p163 to 164 of pfl Vol 14 : [p1788],

SE XI p74-75, And in his case it really seems to have been so. His affects were controlled and subjected to the instinct for research; he did not love and hate, but asked himself about the origin and significance of what he was to love or hate. Thus he was bound at first to appear indifferent to good and evil, beauty and ugliness. During this work of investigation love and hate threw off their positive or negative signs and were both alike transformed into intellectual interest. In reality Leonardo was not devoid of passion; he did not lack the divine spark which is directly or indirectly the driving force – il primo motore – behind all human activity. He had merely converted his passion into a thirst for knowledge; he then applied himself to investigation with the persistence, constancy and penetration which is derived from passion, and at the climax of intellectual labour, when knowledge had been won, he allowed the long restrained affect to break loose and to flow away freely, as a stream of water drawn from a river is allowed to flow away when its work is done. When, at the climax of a discovery, he could survey a large portion of the whole nexus, he was overcome by emotion, and in ecstatic language praised the splendour of the part of creation that he had studied, or – in religious phraseology – the greatness of his Creator. This process of transformation in Leonardo has been rightly understood by Solmi. After quoting a passage of this sort in which Leonardo celebrates the sublime law of nature ('O miracle necessità …'), he writes (1910, 11): [given in Italian in Freud's original & this translation] Such a transfiguration of natural science into a sort of religious emotion is one of the characteristic features of Leonardo's manuscripts, and there are hundreds and hundreds of examples of it.

Solmi E. (1910) 'La resurrezione dell'opera di Leonardo', in Coeferenze Fiorentine, Milan, I. (66-7, 75, 76, 122)

[ii] From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mana_(disambiguation) :

Mana is a Polynesian concept of power, often in a supernatural context.

Mana may also refer to: Cultural anthropology

• māna, a concept in Buddhism, one of the defilements
• Mana (Anglo-Saxon), a life-force or charisma stemming from the divine lineage of kings
• Mana Genita, a Roman goddess who presided over burials
• Mana mutra, the practice of drinking one's own urine as a medicine
• Manna or mana, a food produced for the Israelites in the desert
• Mana, another name for the underworld, tuonela, in Finnic mythology

JE notes, Probably the biblical reference is the most apt, though the Anglo-Saxon definition fits.

[iii] The permanence of what is accumulated is probably a further reference to Wilhelm Reich (see above).

Wirkung probably refers back to mana (see above) & to this phrase 'which concerns something of a very different order than this 'energy', or even 'force''. See the definitions below.

Definition of Wirkung

From http://www.dict.cc/german-english/Wirkung.html

Wirkung

Impact,  virtue [archaic] [effective force or power],  effect,  appeal,  force,  consequence,  impression [effect],  agency [effect, impact],  action [effect],  activity,  influence,  feck [Scot.],  effect on something,  consequences

[iv] From  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_stoffs  During World War II, Germany fielded many aircraft and rockets whose fuels, and oxidizers, were designated (letter)-Stoff.

In German, Stoff means roughly the same thing as English "stuff", both of which derive from the Old French word estoffe (meaning cloth or material). Stoff has as broad a range of meanings, ranging from "chemical substance" to "cloth", depending on the context. The common elements (hydrogen, oxygen, carbon and nitrogen) are named respectively Wasserstoff, Sauerstoff, Kohlenstoff and Stickstoff (literally: 'water-stuff', 'sour-stuff', 'coal-stuff' and 'smother-stuff', respectively) in German. Stoff was used in chemical code names in both World War I and World War II.

***

SE XI p80-81

***

-Bemerkungen über Sublimierung (Observations on Sublimation): 1922 : Siegfried Bernfeld , see this site  /5 Authors A-Z (Bernfeld) or  https://web.archive.org/web/20200923122517/http://www.lacanianworks.net/?p=1054

References to Leonardo, this text, on

*

p334 of Bernfelt, Über die inneren Veranlassungen der Sublimierung wissen wir ebensowenig, wie etwa über die der Verdrängung. Wir sind genötigt, Verdrängungsneigung und Sublimierungsfähigkeit zu den angeborenen Dispositionen des Id, beziehungsweise der Libido zu zählen?.  [2]

[2] Freud: Leonardo, S. 75, Drei Abhandlungen, S. 100/101

Internet translation Bernfeld, We know just as little about the inner mechanisms of sublimation as we do, for example, about those of repression. Are we obliged to regard the tendency towards repression and the capacity for sublimation as innate dispositions of the id, or of the libido, respectively?  [2]

[2]  Probably SE XI p80,  In virtue of a special disposition, the third type, which is the rarest and most perfect, escapes both inhibition of thought and neurotic compulsive thinking. It is true that here too sexual repression comes about, but it does not succeed in relegating a component instinct of sexual desire to the unconscious. Instead, the libido evades the fate of repression by being sublimated from the very beginning into curiosity and by becoming attached to the powerful instinct for research as a reinforcement. Here, too, the research becomes to some extent compulsive and a substitute for sexual activity; but owing to the complete difference in the underlying psychical processes (sublimation instead of an irruption from the unconscious) the quality of neurosis is absent; there is no attachment to the original complexes of infantile sexual research, and the drive [trieb NOT instinct] can operate freely in the service of intellectual interest. Sexual repression, which has made the instinct (Trieb is not in the German) so strong through the addition to it of sublimated libido, is still taken into account by the instinct (trieb is not in the German), in that it avoids any concern with sexual themes.

New translation,

German,  …und der Trieb kann sich frei im Dienste des intellektuellen Interesses betatigen. Der Sexualverdriingung, die ihn durch den Zuschub von sublimierter Libido so stark gemacht hat, tragt er noch Rechnung, indem er die Beschaftigung mit sexuellen Themen vermeidet.

Via internet, Leonardo (better but needs more work  JE) …and the drive can operate freely in the service of intellectual curiosity. Sexual repression, which has made it so powerful through the addition of sublimated libido, still takes this into account by avoiding dealing with sexual topics.

*

P335-336 of Bernfelt, Es empfiehlt sich, mit der häufigsten Sublimation zu beginnen. Wir Wissen, dass es den Menschen gelingt, ein gewisses, interindividuell verschiedenes Mab von Libido an die Berufstätigkei tzu binden [2] und dab dieses Mab auch intrindividuell schwankend ist, es gibt, wenn man so sagen darf, eine passagère Sublimierung, die im Arbeitsleben des Manschen sehr häufig auftritt und sich wieder zurückbildet.

[2] Freud: Leonardo, S. 17.

Internet Translation, It is advisable to start with the most common type of sublimation.  We know that people are able to channel a certain degree of libido – which varies from person to person – into their work [2] and since this measure also fluctuates inter-individual, there is, if one may put it that way, a passagère (passenger? Or temporary) sublimation which occurs very frequently in a person's working life and then subsides again.

Probably SE XI p80-81, James Strachey's translation, If we reflect on the concurrence in Leonardo of his over-powerful drive [not instinct] for research and the atrophy of his sexual life (which was restricted to what is called ideal [sublimated] homosexuality) we shall be disposed to claim him as a model instance of our third type. The core of his nature, and the secret of it, would appear to be that after his curiosity had been activated in infancy in the service of sexual interests he succeeded in sublimating the greater part of his libido into an urge for research. But it is not easy, to be sure, to prove that this view is right. To do so we should need some picture of his mental development in the first years of his childhood, and it seems foolish to hope for material of that sort when the accounts of his life are so meagre and so unreliable, arid when moreover it is a question of information about circumstances that escape the attention of observers even in relation to people of our own generation.

***

SE XI p96 (foot/shoe fetish)

Note, Four references in Sigmund Freud's texts to shoe fetish are given below.

***

-In 'Fetishism in Statu Nascendi ': July 1929 (Oxford) : Alexander Sandor Lorand , see this site  /5 Authors A-Z (Lorand) or https://web.archive.org/web/20210917045718/http://www.lacanianworks.net/?p=12766

P424 Lorand, … based on Freud's presentation of fetishism, and adds evidence on fetishism in its original, childhood stage. Freud's paper presented fetishism as a substitute for the mother's phallus, which the little boy once believed in and does not want to renounce as a protection against his castration anxiety[i]. Fetishism is the final consequence of the retention of this fantasy even after the individual has been convinced of its falsehood, but in childhood there are other consequences of the 'female penis' phantasy. In connection with the case of little Harry, I was particularly interested in the footnote to Freud's paper, in which he refers back to his 1910 paper, 'A Childhood Memory of Leonardo da Vinci'[ii]. Here he had stated that in foot or shoe fetishism, the foot or shoe is a substitute symbol for the female penis, the female being always the mother.

References

[i] Fetishism : 1927 : Sigmund Freud, SE XXI, See Fetishism : 1927 : Sigmund Freud, on this site  /3 Sigmund Freud (19270101 or Index of Sigmund Freud's texts)

[ii] Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of his Childhood : 1910c : Sigmund Freud

*

Footnote [i] to quote from Alexander Sandor Lorand

From Fetishism : 1927 : Sigmund Freud : SE XXI  (1927-1931)  Penguin Freud Library: vol 7: p345 : Published at www.Freud2Lacan.com :

SEXXI p152, When now I announce that the fetish is a substitute for the penis, I shall certainly create disappointment; so I hasten to add that it is not a substitute for any chance penis, but for a particular and quite special penis that had been extremely important in early child- hood but had later been lost. That is to say, it should normally have been given up, but the fetish is precisely designed to preserve it from extinction. To put it more plainly: the fetish is a substitute for the woman's (the mother's) penis that the little boy once believed in and-for reasons familiar to us-does not want to give up.  l

What happened, therefore, was that the boy refused to take cognisance of the fact of his having perceived that a woman does not possess a penis. No, that could not be true: for if a woman had been castrated, then his own possession of a penis was in danger; and against that there rose in rebellion the portion of his narcissism which Nature has, as a precaution, attached to that particular organ. In later life a grown man may perhaps experience a similar panic when the cry goes up that Throne and Altar are in danger, and similar illogical con- sequences will ensue.

Footnote 1 : This interpretation was made as early as 1910, in my study on Leonardo da Vinci, without any reasons being given for it. [Standard Ed., 11, 96. Cf. Editor's Note above, p. 150.]  [JE notes – see below]

The Editor's note (Fetishism) : 1953 : James Strachey : SE XXI p150 : … which he enlarged upon in a footnote added to the Three Essays in its second edition of l910 (ibid., 7, 155). But soon afterwards a new and more important connection must have occurred to him, for this same added footnote contained the first assertion that the fetish stands for the missing penis of the woman, which had figured prominently among the infantile sexual theories to which he had recently devoted a paper (1908c), ibid., 9, 215- 18. This new explanation of the fetish was also mentioned (as Freud remarks on p. 153n. below) in his study on Leonardo (1910c), ibid., 11, 96, published very soon after the Three Essays footnote[a].

The special question of the origin of foot-fetishism (referred to in the present paper, p. 155 below) attracted Freud's attention a few years later. On March 11, 1914, he read another paper to the Vienna Psycho-Analytical Society, on 'A Case of Foot-Fetishism'. This too remains unpublished, ….

*

– Footnote [a] (James Strachey's note to Fetishism),

From Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality : 1905 : Sigmund Freud :

See Essay I The Sexual Aberration : 1905 :  Sigmund Freud,  this site  /3 Sigmund Freud (19050101)

p67-68 of Vol 7, pfl :  SE VII p155, GWp65 : translated by James Strachey :

Essay I The Sexual Aberrations, (A) Anatomical Extensions, Unsuitable substitutes for the sexual object – fetishism :

In other cases the replacement of the object by a fetish is determined by a symbolic connection of thought, of which the person concerned is usually not conscious. It is not always possible to trace the course of these connections with certainty (The foot, for instance, is an age-old sexual symbol which occurs even in mythology; [1] no doubt the part played by fur as a fetish owes its origin to an association with the hair of the mons (Freud, complete works 1192) Veneris.) None the less even symbolism such as this is not always unrelated to sexual experiences in childhood. [2]

[1] [Freud's Footnote added 1910:] The shoe or slipper is a corresponding symbol of the female genitals.

[2] [Freud's Footnote added 1910:] Psycho-analysis has cleared up one of the remaining gaps in our understanding of fetishism. It has shown the importance, as regards the choice of a fetish, of a coprophilic pleasure in smelling which has disappeared owing to repression. Both the feet and the hair are objects with a strong smell which have been exalted into fetishes after the olfactory sensation has become unpleasurable and been abandoned. Accordingly, in the perversion that corresponds to foot fetishism, it is only dirty and evil-smelling feet that become sexual objects. Another factor that helps towards explaining the fetishistic preference for the foot is to be found among the sexual theories of children (see below Footnote [b] p. 1514, p113 of pfl Vol 7 : SE VII p195) the foot represents a woman's penis, the absence of which is deeply felt. [Added 1915:] In a number of cases of foot-fetishism it has been possible to show that the scopophilic instinct, seeking to reach its object (originally the genitals) from underneath, was brought to a halt in its pathway by prohibition and repression. For that reason it became attached to a fetish in the form of a foot or shoe, the female genitals (in accordance with the expectations of childhood/children) being imagined as male ones.

*

-Footnote [b] to Freud's footnote [2]

Essay II Infantile Sexuality, 1905, Section 5 The sexual researches of childhood. : p. 1514, SE VII p195, p113 of pfl Vol 7

See Essay II Infantile Sexuality : 1905 : Sigmund Freud, this site  /3 Sigmund Freud (19050101)

SE VII p195, On the contrary, the existence of two sexes does not to begin with arouse any difficulties or doubts in children. It is self-evident to a male child that a genital like his own is to be attributed to everyone he knows, and he cannot make its absence tally with his picture of these other people.

Castration Complex and Penis Envy

This conviction is energetically maintained by boys, is obstinately defended against the contradictions which defended against the contradictions which soon result from observation, and is only abandoned after severe internal struggles (the castration complex). The substitutes for this penis which they feel is missing in women play a great part in determining the form taken by many perversions.

[Freud's Footnote 2, added in1920:] We are justified in speaking of a castration complex in women as well. Both male and female children form a theory that women no less than men originally had a penis, but that they have lost it by castration. The conviction which is finally reached by males that women have no penis often leads them to an enduringly low opinion of the other sex.

 The assumption that all human beings have the same (male) form of genital is the first of the many remarkable and momentous sexual theories of children. It is of little use to a child that the science of biology justifies his prejudice and has been obliged to recognise the female clitoris as a true substitute for the penis.

*

–Footnote [ii] to Alexander Sandor Lorand's quote above

Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of his Childhood : 1910c : Sigmund Freud,

This paper, see above for availability

SE XI p96 : Before the child comes under the dominance of the castration-complex-at a time when he still holds women at full value – he begins to display an intense desire to look, as an erotic instinctual activity. He wants to see other people's genitals, at first in all probability to compare them with his own. The erotic attraction that comes from his mother soon culminates in a longing for her genital organ, which he takes to be a penis. With the discovery, which is not made till later, that women do not have a penis, this longing often turns into its opposite and gives place to a feeling of disgust which in the years of puberty can become the cause of psychical impotence, misogyny and permanent homosexuality. But the fixation on the object that was once strongly desired, the woman's penis, leaves indelible traces on the mental life of the child, who has pursued that portion of his infantile sexual researches with particular thoroughness. Fetishistic reverence for a woman's foot and shoe appears to take the foot merely as a substitutive symbol for the woman's penis which was once revered and later missed; without knowing it, 'coupeurs de nattes' [1] play the part of people who carry out an act of castration on the female genital organ.

People will not reach a proper understanding of the activities of children's sexuality and will probably take refuge in declaring that what has been said here is incredible, so long as they cling to the attitude taken up by our civilization of depreciating the genitals and the sexual functions. To understand the mental life of children we require analogies from primitive times. Through a long series of generations the genitals have been for us the 'pudenda', objects of shame, and even (as a result of further successful sexual repression) of disgust. Footnote [1]  [Perverts who enjoy cutting off females' hair.]

***

Jacques Lacan refers to the foot/shoe fetish

***

28^th November 1956

Session of Seminar IV The three forms of the lack of object : 28^th November 1956 : Jacques Lacan, at this site  /4 Jacques Lacan (19561128 or 19561121)

P11 of EC translation group's translation, It's very clear that the object of privation is only ever a symbolic object – this is completely clear. That which is of the order of privation, that which is not in its place or, to be exact, that which is not in its place from the point of view of the real, this means absolutely nothing. All that is real is always and necessarily in its place, even when we disturb it. The real has the foremost property of wearing its place on the soles of its shoes – you can disturb the real as much as you like but, regardless, our bodies will still be in their place after they explode, their place of pieces. The absence of something in the real is something purely symbolic; that is, as long as we define by means of the law that it should be there, an object is missing at its place

***

5^th December 1956

Session of Seminar IV The signifier and the Holy Spirit : 5^th December 1956, at this site  /4 Jacques Lacan (19561205 or 19561121)

P1-2 of EC translation group's translation, In order to clarify these ideas, I have already taken up two examples that I said I would focus on: the phobia and the fetish. These are objects that are far from having revealed their secret – you would be wrong to believe that – whatever the exercises, acrobatics, contortions, or phantasmatic geneses to which one might give oneself over. It remains quite mysterious that, at certain periods in the lives of children, male or female, they feel obliged to be afraid of lions, which are not objects very commonly encountered in their experience. It is difficult to make their form emerge from any sort of primitive datum, inscribed in the image of the body, for instance. Whatever we do, a residue remains. It is always the residues in scientific explanations that are the most fruitful to consider. In any case, it is certainly not by sidestepping them that we make progress. Likewise you might have noticed that it is still quite clear in all of this that the number of sexual fetishes is quite limited. Why? Setting aside shoes, which here take on such a striking role in this regard, such that one wonders how it is that we do not pay more attention to them[2], we hardly find anything but garters, stockings, bras and others. All of these are worn close enough to the skin but shoes are the most common. Here, once again, is a residue. Here

are objects about which we wonder whether they are imaginary objects, and whether we can deduce their kinetic value in the economy of the libido on the sole basis of what may happen to emerge from a genesis – once again, in short, the notion of an ectopia in a certain typical relation with something that has emerged from another typical relation said to belong to stages following previous stages. Nonetheless, no matter what the objects are, whether or not they are the objects you were dealing with yesterday evening, it is perfectly clear that they represent something which causes us great embarrassment, which is certainly extremely fascinating – one only has to see the interest raised in the gathering and the extent of the discussion. But these objects are, in the first place, if we wanted to approach them, we would say that they are constructions which order, organise, articulate, as we said, a certain experience, but what is completely striking is the use made of them by the practitioner, Ms. [Françoise] Dolto [*], as it happens.

[2] On the topic of foot and shoe fetishes, see, for example, Freud, S. (1905). Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (SE VII), p. 155.  [Quotation above]

[*] Françoise Dolto –

From Julia Evans translation notes : May 2018

ECp1/Para 1 :Ladies and gentlemen, last night, you heard someone [un sujet] speak of the image of the body.

"Presentation by Françoise Dolto of 4th December 1956"

Note 1 : See Discussion de la Conférence : 4th December 1956 : Françoise Dolto, see this site  /5 Authors A-Z (Dolto)

Note 2 : 1953, 20 January:  Lacan is elected president of the SPP. Creation of the Société Française de Psychanalyse (SFP) by Daniel Lagache (1903-1972), Françoise Dolto (1908-1988) and Juliette Favez-Boutonnier (1903-1994)

Owen Hewitson writes :

From https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image_inconsciente_du_corps.

'Unconscious image of the body' :

Françoise Dolto started conceptualising it from 1956 so the dates align. Her book carrying the same name was published in France in 1984.

There's more about it on 'her' site here – http://www.dolto.fr/apports-theoriques-image-inconsciente-du-corps.html (in French) [September 2026 – although this site exists there is no link to 'image inconsciente du corps']

but in English this site has a bit of detail:  https://artlark.org/2022/08/25/francoise-dolto-children-psychoanalysis-and-the-unconscious-body-image/

Some quotes of relevant passages from this site:

Dolto believed that the quality of the adult-child relationship played a decisive role in the child's later development, the unconscious body image being one of the outcomes of this relationship. The unconscious body image functions in the here and now as a synthesis of the emotional, sensory, and language experiences of early infancy. "According to her own saying, Dolto created her concept of the unconscious body image out of her associations with the French word "i-ma-ge" (image). Therein the "i" refers to the "identité" (identity) that forms the central idea of her conception of the body image; "ma" refers to "maman" (mother), while the signifier "ge" refers to "the earth, the basis or to the body" as well as to the pronoun "je" (I)."(Helena de Preester, Veroniek Knockaert, Body Image and Body Schema: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Body)

"The unconscious image of the body is always shaped in relation to the other – in particular to the care-giving mother – and refers the subject of desire to her jouir. In this respect, Dolto remains very faithful to Freud's Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905). However, the jouir is always mediated by the language of communication with others, e.g., the words of the mother that articulate the baby's struggles and validates (valorizes) them or overrules them – "You are happy." "You like that, don't you?" "You're not comfortable." "Don't touch. It's dirty", etc. We can cite the example of the little girl who, in her first session with Françoise Dolto, drew a beautiful bouquet of flowers in full bloom, whereas the same girl, in the presence of her mother, drew a bouquet of faded flowers. The unconscious image of the body was experienced differently depending on whether the child was with the mother, or alone with her own narcissism." (Guy Hall, Françoise Hivernel, Sian Morgan, Theory and Practice in Child Psychoanalysis: An Introduction to the Work of Françoise Dolto)

***

19^th December 1956

Session of Seminar IV On analysis as bundling : 19^th December 1956 : Jacques Lacan, see this site  /4 Jacques Lacan (19561219 or 19561121)

P7-8 of EC translation group's translation, We also know that, given the trademark of the imaginary relation is to be always perfectly reciprocal since it is a mirror relation, we must expect to see in the fetishist, from time to time, the appearance of the position, not of identification with the mother, but identification with the object. This is effectively what we will see happen over the course of an analysis of a fetishist, for this position as such is always the most unsatisfying one there is. It is not enough that for a brief moment the fascinating illumination of the object which had been the maternal object is something that satisfies the subject. It is not enough for an erotic balance to be established around this. And indeed, for now, if it is with the object that he identifies, he will lose what we might call his primitive object, namely, the mother. He will consider himself a destructive object for the mother. It is this perpetual game, this sort of profound double vision which marks all the apprehension of the fetishist manifestation, which we shall go into later.

But it is so visible and patent that someone such as Phyllis Greenacre [7], who seriously attempted to deal with the foundations of the fetishist relation in depth, tells us that we seem to be in the presence of a subject who could show us his own image in two opposed mirrors with excessive swiftness. She says it like this without, at that point, knowing why – for this comes at an awkward moment – but she had, all of a sudden, the feeling that it was this: he is never where he is for the very good reason that he has left his place – he has gone, in a specular relation, from the mother to the phallus. He alternates between being one and the other, a position which only stabilises provided that he seizes this sort of simultaneously unique, privileged and impermanent symbol, which is the precise object of fetishism – that is, something which symbolises the phallus. It is therefore at the level of analogous relations – at least, those which we are able to conceive as essentially being of a perverse nature – that the results manifest themselves as only fleeting, at least when faced with a certain way of handling the anaclitic relation if it is focused entirely on the object relation as something involving only the imaginary and the real, and if it adjusts the whole adaptation of the imaginary relation according to the supposed real of the presence of the analyst.

[7] See, for instance, Greenacre, P. (1953). Certain Relationships Between Fetishism and Faulty Development of the Body Image. in Psychoanalytic Studies of the Child, vol. 8, pp. 79-98.

From Julia Evans' translation notes, probably October 2018,

19^th December 1956 Para 34 : someone such as Phyllis Greenacre, who seriously attempted to deal with the foundation of the fetishist relation in depth.

See Certain Relationships Between Fetishism and Faulty Development of the Body Image : 1953 : Phyllis Greenacre, at this site  /5 Authors A-Z (Greenacre) or https://web.archive.org/web/20220903135359/https://lacanianworks.net/1953/01/certain-relationships-between-fetishism-and-faulty-development-of-the-body-image-1953-phyllis-greenacre/

Poem from the end of this paper:

FOOTNOTE TO FETISHISM

A shoe is a shoe is a shoe-

A shoe and you are two.

A shoe has no teeth-does not bite,

A shoe does not cause any fright.

You can look at a shoe, you can step on a shoe.

You can smell at a shoe and you'll never feel blue.

A shoe keeps silent, a shoe does not speak,

A shoe keeps your secrets, there's never a leak.

A shoe is a father, a shoe is a mother,

Creates only joy and never a bother,

A shoe can be kicked, a shoe can be torn

And a new one is bought when the old one is worn.

A shoe is a cheap pal, discreet, near and true-

A shoe is a shoe is a shoe,

-Anonymous Contribution to Discussion

*

19^th December 1956

Session of Seminar IV On analysis as bundling : 19^th December 1956 : Jacques Lacan, see this site  /4 Jacques Lacan (19561219 or 19561121)

P11 of EC group's translation, I simply wanted you to get a sense that assuredly the notion of the distance to the analyst–object qua real object, and the so–called notion of reference, can be something which is not without effect. These are, ultimately, perhaps not the most desirable effects. I am not telling you how this treatment terminates. Every detail is so rich in pedagogical value that one would have to examine it meticulously. The last session is avoided. The subject gets an operation on some varicose vein as well– it's all there… the timid attempt to access castration, and a certain freedom which can spring from it, is even indicated there – after which it is judged that this is sufficient. The subject goes back to his mistress, the same one he had at the beginning, the one who is fifteen years older than him. And since he no longer speaks of her large size, his phobia is considered to be healed. Unfortunately, starting then, he is occupied by one thing only – the size of his shoes. Sometimes they are too large and he loses his balance, or they are too small and squeeze his feet – in such a way that the shift, the transformation, of the phobia is accomplished. After all, why not consider this to be the end of the analytic work? In any event, from the experimental point of view there is something which is certainly not devoid of interest. The peak, of course, of access to supposed comfort, to the real object, is given as if there were almost a sign of recognition. I am speaking to those in the know, of the moment when the subject perceives, in the presence of the analyst, a smell of urine – this being considered as the moment when the distance to the real object… throughout the observations it is pointed out that it is here, the point on which the entire neurotic relation fails… when the distance is finally right.

***

16^th January 1957

Session of Seminar IV 'A child is being beaten' & the Young Homosexual Woman : 16^th January 1957 : Jacques Lacan, see this site  /4 Jacques Lacan (19570116 or 19571121)

P7 of EC group's translation, Now recall what you know about the fetish, for example, this fetish concerning which you have been told that it can be explained by this never-before-seen 'beyond'. And rightly so! It's the penis of the phallic mother, which is linked for the subject – most often after a brief analytic effort, at least regarding those memories which are still accessible to the subject – to a situation in which, we could say, the child halts in his observations, at least in his memory, at the hem of his mother's dress, where we find a sort of remarkable contest in amongst the structure of what we could call the screen memory, that is, the moment where the chain of memories stops, and it effectively stops at the hem of the dress, no higher than the ankle. This is indeed the reason why it is here that we have the shoe and this is also why the shoe can, at least in particular cases – but this is an exemplary case – take on the function of a substitute for what is not seen but is articulated, formulated, as being here truly for the subject of the mother who possesses this phallus – imaginary, undoubtedly – but essential to her symbolic foundation as phallic mother. Here we find ourselves facing something of the same order, facing this thing which fixes, reduces to the status of a snapshot, the course of memories by arresting it at this point which is called a screen memory, in the manner of something which would unfold rather quickly and that would stop at a single point all at once, freezing all the characters, as in a cinematographic movement, this sort of snapshot that characterises this reduction of the full, meaningful scene, articulated from subject to subject, [a reduction] to something that immobilises itself in this fantasy, which remains charged with all the erotic values that are included in what [the scene] expressed, and of which it is, in a sense, the witness, the support, the last remaining support. Here, we are touching upon how what we might call the mould of perversion, namely, this valorisation of the image, insofar as it remains the privileged witness of something which must be articulated in the unconscious, must be put into play again in the dialectics of transference, that is, in something which must re-expand within the analytic dialogue.

***

30^th January 1957

Session of Seminar IV The function of the veil : 30^th January 1957 : Jacques Lacan, see this site  /4 Jacques Lacan (19570130 or 19561121)

P8 of EC group's translation, Whatever we may make of this, what is much more instructive than any one example of a tainted primary relation is one which appears as a pathological relation, which presents itself as the other side or the complement of the libidinal attachment to the fetish. Fetishism is a class which, nosologically, covers all sorts of things whose resemblance to one another is simply indicated by our intuition. It is very clear, for instance – and we are not mistaken about this – that the fact that the subject is attached to a raincoat seems to be of the same nature as if he were attached to a pair of shoes.

However, structurally speaking, this raincoat contains its own revelations, indicating a slightly different position than that of the shoe or the corset, in that the latter are, strictly speaking, directly in the position of veil between the subject and the object. This raincoat, like any other type of fetish of garments that envelope and which also have the special quality of being made of rubber, has a feature which is encountered very frequently and which always harbours a kind of ultimate mystery. This would no doubt be illuminated by the psychology of sensation, in that this contact with rubber in particular, and more so than other things, can itself contain something like a second skin, or something which has special insulating capacities. Whatever we might make of the structure of the relationships, such as they lend themselves to this or that direction of analytic observation, we see that the raincoat plays a role here which is not quite exactly that of the veil, but rather of something behind which the subject focuses himself [se centre], not in front of the veil, but as if behind it, namely, in the mother's place. And, more specifically, stuck on this identifying position of the mother in which she needs to be protected, in this case by being enveloped – this is what renders the transition between the case of fetishism and the case of transference.

***

27^th February 1957

Session of Seminar IV The phallus and the unfulfilled mother : 27^th February 1957 : Jacques Lacan, at this site  /4 Jacques Lacan (19570227 or 19561121)

P12 of EC group's translation, Similarly, in masculine homosexuality – to restrict ourselves to that, today – it is still the phallus that is at stake for the subject. But, oddly, it is still his, even insofar as he seeks it in another. As a matter of fact, all perversions can be identified through the extent to which they in some way play with this signifying object insofar as it is by its nature and in and of itself, a true signifier – that is, something which can never be reduced to its spatial coordinates. Yet we nonetheless get our hands on it, when we find it fixed definitively in the perversion of perversions, the one which is called fetishism. For that is the one that shows, not only where it truly is, but what it is. When we find it, it is really nothing: old worn clothes, a rag – a part of fetishism is what we see in transvestism. Ultimately, it's a little worn-out shoe.[36]

[36] Other references to a shoe in Seminar IV on 28th November 1956 (p. 11), 5th December 1956 (p. 1) On foot and shoe fetishes see Freud, S. (1905), "Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality" SE VII p. 155 [See above for quotation] & in Seminar IV on 19^th December 1956 (p. 11), 16th January 1957 (p. 7) & 30th January 1957 (p. 8).

***