Stephen Blackwell:...I agree with the idea that Nabokov's main opponent was (is) the popularized Freud...The public image of Freud and Freudianism is its own, free-standing cultural beast (if you will), in part caused by Freud's willingness to publish some things that seem to authorize that beast's existence.

 

JM: Although I tried to move towards other Nabokovian themes, I now gave in to a sudden urge to repeat, to regress, to digress. When I read SB's "cultural beast" I was immediately reminded of a sentence, attributed to Freud, that was suggestive of SB's Beast. Trying to recover it by google-search I discovered an article about Freud and Nannies (I haven't yet read the article in question...).

For a long time I mused about Freudian nannies, significantly present in his earliest works, to Nabokov's experiences with Mademoiselle - and a few other girls and young men. We know how important they were,  and how young Nabokov felt enthranced by Mademoiselle's recitations in French, how appalled he felt by the urine stench from her room, how another nurse Mlle Ida "de La Rivière" was seen peeing in a river in Ardis, aso...).

      

The quote: "I read somewhere that, when entering New York, in his first trip to America, Freud commented to Jung: "They do not know that we are bringing them the pest". The pest, as a metaphor of something brought from the exterior to the interior, certainly continues to spray itself until this day, in the realm of Freudian history: there is always a letter, an interview, or a document never seen before that shows that things were not really as it was thought they were, that what was shown was not all that was to be shown, or that what was shown did not correspond to the analysis made. That is, the fantasies about this history are part of an interminable analysis or an analysis without end."

 

The link: Cadernos Pagu Print version ISSN 0104-8333 Cad. Pagu vol.1 no.se Campinas  2008  Freud's nanny and other nannies,Translated from Cadernos Pagu, Campinas, n.29 p. 61-90, July/Dec. 2007. Mariza Corrêa.*

 

Lacan's own words in relation to "America" explored this "Freudian pest" anedocte.