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Donna Albiera, the wife of the much older Piero da Vinci (who represents Jakob, in Freud’s projected interpretation).
In support of this understanding, Spector identifies the very subjective, personal involvement of Freud in his Leonardo Interpretation.126 Working from Jones127 (who also notices that Freud had a clear autobiographical involvement with this painting), and from the art historian Schapiro,128 Spector notes that Freud minimized the importance of Leonardo’s father and made the abandoned older mother the decisive influence.129 Spector shows that Freud did this in spite of good evidence, of which Freud was aware, that Leonardo’s father was, in fact, probably a very early and important presence in the artist’s life.130 Spector links Freud’s nanny to the theme of the two mothers and suggests that the St. Anne figure is a symbol for the nanny. Spector’s analysis also implies that for Freud, his own father was somehow not that important in the Freiberg years, being instead rather distant or “out of the picture,” as Freud supposed Leonardo’s father had been.131 One remaining point: Freud’s autobiographical identification with this painting also very definitely means that in some sense he viewed himself as the baby Jesus. After all, from Freud’s viewpoint, Jesus also had an ambiguous paternity and (in the painting) two mothers. Reviewing these three examples of “two mothers,” we see that in the story of Oedipus, the biological mother is the one who is enmeshed in her son’s painful fate; that is, the biological mother is the “problem” mother. In Moses and Monotheism, Freud’s central thesis was that Moses was an Egyptian and not a Jew. Since Freud on occasion spoke of himself as Moses, and all agree he often identified with Moses, a most straightforward interpretation of this identification is that in it Freud was denying his own Jewishness (at least his religious Jewishness) and identifying with Egypt. In any case, Freud was again viewing the biological mother as the problem; he also implicitly was endorsing the functional (non-Jewish) mother as the true mother. Finally, in Leonardo’s case, there was a direct preference for the older peasant mother, Caterina, over the “young tender stepmother, Donna Albiera,” a representation of Amalia. In short, “see how the old liking breaks through.”132 Freud’s First “Anna,” or What Was the Nanny Called?The name of the nanny, as already mentioned, was Resi (Theresa) Wittek. This name is not how she would have been referred to by young Freud or by members of his family, however. It is safe to assume that she was called “Amme” by the members of Sigmund’s family, since this is the common German name for a such a woman in the home, and since this was the name Freud himself once gave her.133 In this connection, it is |