Jim Twiggs:... I
wish to call attention to another work that ...fits nicely into the
discussion of VN vs. Freud... Freud and the Child-Woman: The Memoirs of Fritz
Wittels... [A]mong early reviewers of Lolita, there were several who saw
Dolores as a coarse, oversexed brat who brings a well-bred scholar-gentleman
first to his knees and then to grief and murder.." Related to.Freud’s response
to Wittels’s paper:, his fury "suggests that Wittels had touched
Freud’s deepest fears about psychoanalysis. ‘It was not his intention, he said,
to lead the world to an uninhibited frenzy. On the contrary he wished to teach
men not to satisfy their instincts in ...neurotic disguises... Instead of
repressing and lying to themselves they should consciously reject what they
consider evil.’ ...Wittels accuses Freud of not having the courage of his own
convictions. So we see, even at this early date, deep conflicts within the inner
circle of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society over the meaning of Freud’s
message...
JM: No free institution
is without conflicts and dissenters. Freud's meaning, though, is
clearly stated in his extensive works (there's no need to interpret them
any further). Wittels accusation, as I see it, is totally unfounded
since, from all the pointers I got, Freud was a morally
courageous man. If he harbored special "evils" and avoided them, it
was by conscious deliberation, exactly as he recommends in theory.
According to Jim Twiggs, editor
Edward "Timms tracked down Wittels’s papers. He goes on to say that “it
was Wittels who in 1907 initiated the cult of the ‘child woman’, in a paper
which he read to Freud in private, presented to the Psychoanalytic Society and
then published in Kraus’s magazine Die Fackel (‘The Torch’).” I can
only surmise that the report about Freud's reaction to the
paper concerns its first private reading. About Wittel's article, after he
presented it in the Vienna Psychoanaly Society, there might be other
records available related to how well it was received by his
colleagues. It appears that Wittel was unable to publish it in any
reputable psychoanalytic journal since it came out under the auspices
of Kraus's magazine.
Anyway, I hesitate
about comparing Irma (a real person) and Lolita (fictional character)
- or Kraus and Humbert for the same reason. Lolita's background is
widely different from Irma's, and their story has only superficial
similarities.Besides, Wittels's "Child-Woman" image is quite distinct from
Humbert's definition of a "Nymphet" and John Ray Jr's
"clinical case" belongs to Nabokov's criticism against
psychiatrists in general ( in general).
And ( but this is a risky hunch)...I
find no common traits between the pair ( Kraus, Wittels) and
Nabokov: this is why I think that, had Nabokov read the
story ( JT: " I do not, of course, claim that VN
took anything from the story of Irma, or that he was even aware of it.
Nevertheless, there are some clear similarities between Irma and Dolores. In
both cases, a young girl is treated not only as a sex object but also as a
suitable object of study by much older, well-educated men who “solipsize” her
for their less-than-honorable purposes"), he would have avoided
these "clear similarities" or, even worse, he might have given up
writing "Lolita" altogether. Nabokov, like Freud, seems to have been free
enough to exercise moral choices, unlike the other two.