PS to "Van is captivated by conscious experience, like his insomniac creator, in which there's obviously no place for a Freudian 'unconscious'."   

 

JM:I stressed "Freudian unconscious" in my reply to Anthony Stadlen because Nabokov regularly turned to the Viennese. And because I remembered Freud's assertion in his article "Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety" that "there is much more continuity between intrauterine life and earliest infancy than the impressive caesura of the act of birth would have us believe" (Freud, 1925, ISA).

There's no place in Van's theorizations for any unconscious,such as the impersonal philogenetic memories for example.. 

Cf. Pale Fire/John Shade (lines 643/44): "And to fulfill the fish wish of the womb,/ A school of Freudians headed for the tomb."