Thanks, Peter Dale, for extracting
Nabokov's quotation from the article on Freud in the Italian
newspaper. I can only blame my non-updated Adobe tools and my general
incapacity with computers for not having done so.
Stephen Blackwell's careful note
mentioned "VN's decades-long crusade against popularized Freudianism",
and "popularized" is a term people often forget to consider while
endorsing VN's opinions about Freud. It appears to me that VN usually
directed his invectives against what falls under the term "Applied
Psychoanalysis", not to Psychoanalysis itself.
Whether Nabokov liked it or not he was
more of a Freudian than the majority of present day psychoanalysts
- since his works bear witness to the recognition of the
constant interference of unconscious processes in daily life ( besides
several other freudian ideas so engrained in our discourse that we no
longer realize the breakthrough they represented when described for the
first time.)
Richard Rorty once wrote that Nabokov might have resented Freud because
he wrote several of the "best lines" he, VN himself, would have liked
to have writen before him. I don't think such an assertion can be
sustained, but I remembered this quip because it suggests VN's grasp
of an important part of Freud's theories.
Jansy Mello