ABSTRACT
At first sight, Freud’s Leonardo and “Schreber” might appear to be simple clinical vignettes, illustrating psychoanalytic theory. Thanks to psychoanalytic theory, we might be able to explain the enigma of Leonardo’s personality through an amorous fixation upon his mother, which leads to homosexuality, and we might be able to explain Schreber’s delusions by a homosexual fixation upon his father (and his brother), that is unable to find any outlet due to a lack of offspring. Whatever the fixation may be, it is always a question of a fixation at a stage and to a personage of the general structure of the psyche, and the manifestations of this fixation are modulated by repression. The whole gamut of great Freudian concepts is in play in each of the two cases, but in the particular cases of Leonardo and Schreber only the application of quite general concepts is demonstrated. For Leonardo and sublimation, it is a question of explaining the passage from the functioning of a drive with a libidinal aim, to a non-libidinal functioning, which then supposes the unity of drives (sexual and non-sexual): the young child wonders about sexuality, and about where babies come from, and makes his sexual drive drift towards a properly intellectual interest, the passion of knowing how to explain what one does not know. For Schreber and his failure of sublimation, it is a question of explaining the radical opposition of the two types of drive: the failure of sublimation intervenes in the framework of an increase of the libido according to life circumstances. Like at the time of puberty, this irruption of the libido is supposed to demonstrate sublimation. The drives that were able to be employed for non-sexual aims became re-sexualised, and, due to the lack 26of an available object, turn back upon the ego. In both cases the sexual drive can become non-sexual, and the non-sexual sexual. Regardless of the classical division of the drives into sexual drives and drives of self-preservation, the “sexual” is the first condition of the drive in general: it is the sexual that prevails.
