Just this: not text, but texture; not the dream
But
topsy-turvical coincidence,
Not flimsy nonsense, but a web of
sense.
...
Plexed artistry, and something of the same
Pleasure in
it as they who played it found.
It was when I realized more clearly wherein lies one of
Nabokov's oppositions to Freud. Nabokov's resistance to
Psychoanalysis doesn't seem to be related to matters of sex and
repression as much as to Freud's ideas about psychic determinism.
It's more a matter of mastery than of "sex". Freud didn't believe that our actions are a consequence of
our free-will, nor that they are inspired by mystical forces. He held
that human behavior in a present situation necessarily derives
from significant ("libidinal") prior events, in an endless chain of
causations. For him, our dreams are never a random production because their
unravelling reveals the dreamer's unconscious desires, and his "style"
of finding his way for their satisfaction (Freud was more interested in the
latter, i.e, how dreams reveal the structure of an
indivual's symptom-formation, constructed as a barrier against
perceiving the nature of his forbidden
wishes.)
Although, through John Shade, we hear that life and dreams are
"not flimsy nonsense" - and here Nabokov and Freud share the same view
about "a web of sense" - Shade seems to differ radically from
Freud when he admits the influence of "topsy-turvical
coincidence," ordained by "they who play" the game of worlds
to weave "plexed artistry." Besides, Shade considers it possible
to mimic the gods to extract a similar pleasure solely
through his inventiveness: his art would transform him into a
god's equal (an idea Shade shares with Nabokov, as he made them explicit in an
interview in SO). Therefore an author, like Shade's,
should have divine authorial rights to determine the fates of his
characters: he mustn't feel helpless by the dictates of his
creature's destiny, nor should he fear that
he'll be revealing undesirable secrets of his own (his
galley-slaves become as "gargoyles" who lie outside his
cathedral). A completely different perspective emerges
from an attentive reading of Freud. For him, there are hidden
forces that arise from a clash between pressures, determined
by human culture, and an individual's drives. There's nothing
transcendental in this process. There are no gods and behavioral coincidences
simply do not exist.
Freud was concerned about human suffering, mental anguish and
the psychic mechanisms that distort our hability to "think clear" because
of "repression" (in its wider, psychological, sense): he was not an
agent of "symbolic" tyranny, nor was he an advocate for
sexual liberation. The sentence that struck
me today is still mysterious. I cannot be sure that
what Shade means by a "dream" is applicable to a sleeping
person's productions, as those Freud described in his "The Interpretation of
Dreams." ( ideals, and hallucinations, are often confused with
real dreams).
Sorry for oversimplifying matters psychoanalytical and
viennese.