It all began with a childhood memory of Leonardo da Vinci, almost a dream: "It seemed to me that while I was in the cradle, a kite (hawk) descended upon me, opened my mouth with its tail and pecked me several times between the lips". That image charged with pleasure and pain, evoked by Sigmund Freud in Psychoanalysis of Art, gives off a timeless feeling in Serguéi Eisenstein (1898-1948). Based on the Renaissance totem-figure, this dreamlike image had a transcendental impact on his poetic imagination. The Latvian sought in Freudian theory the meaning of that reverie, an impulse that the psychoanalytic plot, like so many things, never managed to decipher, but which in his mind traced one of the mysterious thresholds of sexuality.