Spitzer, Jennifer. Nabokov and the Lure of Freudian Forms. 2023

Vladimir Nabokov presents the most well-known and explicit rejection of Freud by a twentieth-century author and modernist. He dedicates his pivotal work, Lolita, to an extended satire of Freudian forms. Lolita is not only structured as a parodic case study, it is reliant on Freud’s theories of child sexual development, traumatic repetition, and father-child incest, while proliferating Freudian puns and wordplay. Lolita burlesques psychoanalytic interpretation, including its “symbol hunting” and paranoid style, while also relying on a “hermeneutics of suspicion.” As the chapter suggests, the only ethical orientation to Lolita is a hermeneutics of suspicion, one that reads Humbert’s discourse against the grain of his intentions and looks for flashes of Lolita and her experience through the confusing mesh of Humbert’s perspective.