-------- Original Message --------
>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.
--------> I think VN's animus was directed not only to vulgar
Freudianism (cf. "vulgar Marxism"), but to a kind of intellectual
vulgarity that may be found in the writings of the great psycholgist
himself.
--------> The epitome of this may be in Freud's idea of the Oedipus
complex, which functioned as a form of "denial", and consequently as
a sanction, of socially accepted (at the time) pedophilia, and
which amounted, like other of Freud's notions, to an unverifiable,
and fantastic, hypothesis.
>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
--------> Freud did not discover "the constant interference of
unconscious processes in daily life." But he did turn the lights on
in "the unconscious." Unfortunately the way he did this was
mystifying (positing as it did apparently oxmoronic unconscious
intentions, for example), often unverifiable (and vulgar), as well as
illuminating.
--------> I like the idea of Nabokov as a Freudian, but would caution
that it amounts only to a parody.
>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.
--------> Hm. Such as?
Best regards, Jansy,
Walter
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