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Re: [Fwd: Re: [NABOKV-L] VN and Freud]
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I´ll answer A. Stadlen's message along with Miale's so that only one posting will be sufficient.
Yesterday our ED S. Blackwell mentioned his article in Nabokov Studies, vol.7,2002/03 " Nabokov's Weiner-schnitzel (sic) Dreams". Beside this text I also read Eric Naiman's "Perversion in Pnin", present in the same issue. They confirmed the opinions of Stadlen and Miale and helped me to realize that I'm in a minority of one.
I hope I'm in good company.
I'll start with Miale's last question ( "Such as?" ) refering to Rorty's sentence, by quoting it correctly.
"...Freud was the one man Nabokov resented in the same obsessive and intense way that Heidegger resented Nietzsche - the resentment of a precursor who may already have written all one's best lines."
R.Rorty, The Barber of Kasbeam: Nabokov on Cruelty, The Bennington Chapbooks on Literature, 1988, page 18.
In my opinion, more than an infantile play with hidden sexual meanings thru wordplay, VN was seriously engaged in exploring the avenues of humor, dreams and eroticism. Freud may have "written the best lines" on these subjects, but he also had something to say concerning perversion, human cruelty, the compulsion to repeat and the death drive.
(Freud won no Nobel prize, but he was awarded a highly regarded "Goethe Prize"for his writings).
Stadlen wrote: "VN explicitly attacked Freud's dream theory, which Freud himself thought his greatest work, and the foundation of psychoanalysis proper."
I would like to remind him that what most people usually consider as the gist of Freud's "Traumdeutung" is only one chapter ( namely: "dream symbolism").
His books contain a vast amount of research collected from articles by his predecessors, plus his own neurophysiological researches and the analysis of his dreams. Most importantly, there he tried to demonstrate that mental illness (neurotic symptoms), faulty actions ( parapraxis), humor and dreams are related.
Freud's book on dreams actually advances the hypothesis that you can learn something from regular expressions of normal behavior ( such as dreams, jokes or lapsus linguae). Then it goes on to demonstrate that these function just like the neurotic symptoms. In this way he shows that this link enables us to understand and treat mental illness in a more individualistic and humane way, in contrast to what had been attempted until then.
The mechanisms that lie behind these normal behaviors were demonstrated operating in what he named "the dreamwork". To name the two most important ones: condensation ( metaphor) and displacement (metonimy).
Unfortunately what caught people's fancies were, mainly, the milenary imagery, euphemisms and symbols for sex and the obscene (easily found in ancient Indian, Arabian or Greek poetry) - which he applied to understand the repressed meaning of the dreams. It's not even necessary to read those very ancient texts to confirm Freud's sources for "dream symbolism". Poems of courtly love abound with "disguised" and "devious" symbols.Shakespeare. Rabelais... What I see in common bt. Freud and VN has no relation to the popular view that invents a "dictionary for symbols" but the grasp of the mechanisms that are peculiar to the "dreamwork" which take place in our ordinary lives and disrupt our plans.
Miale's arguments are in some respects quite similar to those advanced by Blackwell in his article (mentioned above), but Miale's words take this view to extremes all his own when he states that "the oedipus complex functioned as a form of denial" ( where did he get this idea?) "a sanction, of socially accepted pedophilia"...(???).
No one who has read Freud with an unprejudiced view would sustain such an assumption from Freud's books.
Freud was never "vulgar", although freudianists usually are. He was concerned with human conflicts and pain.
But...Yes! Yes! ( at last) to Miale's observation that he liked "the idea of Nabokov as a Freudian, but would caution that it amounts only to a parody.". Of course, and in a way that made him more Freudian than he'd have liked to think.
Search the archive: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/archives/nabokv-l.html
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm
Yesterday our ED S. Blackwell mentioned his article in Nabokov Studies, vol.7,2002/03 " Nabokov's Weiner-schnitzel (sic) Dreams". Beside this text I also read Eric Naiman's "Perversion in Pnin", present in the same issue. They confirmed the opinions of Stadlen and Miale and helped me to realize that I'm in a minority of one.
I hope I'm in good company.
I'll start with Miale's last question ( "Such as?" ) refering to Rorty's sentence, by quoting it correctly.
"...Freud was the one man Nabokov resented in the same obsessive and intense way that Heidegger resented Nietzsche - the resentment of a precursor who may already have written all one's best lines."
R.Rorty, The Barber of Kasbeam: Nabokov on Cruelty, The Bennington Chapbooks on Literature, 1988, page 18.
In my opinion, more than an infantile play with hidden sexual meanings thru wordplay, VN was seriously engaged in exploring the avenues of humor, dreams and eroticism. Freud may have "written the best lines" on these subjects, but he also had something to say concerning perversion, human cruelty, the compulsion to repeat and the death drive.
(Freud won no Nobel prize, but he was awarded a highly regarded "Goethe Prize"for his writings).
Stadlen wrote: "VN explicitly attacked Freud's dream theory, which Freud himself thought his greatest work, and the foundation of psychoanalysis proper."
I would like to remind him that what most people usually consider as the gist of Freud's "Traumdeutung" is only one chapter ( namely: "dream symbolism").
His books contain a vast amount of research collected from articles by his predecessors, plus his own neurophysiological researches and the analysis of his dreams. Most importantly, there he tried to demonstrate that mental illness (neurotic symptoms), faulty actions ( parapraxis), humor and dreams are related.
Freud's book on dreams actually advances the hypothesis that you can learn something from regular expressions of normal behavior ( such as dreams, jokes or lapsus linguae). Then it goes on to demonstrate that these function just like the neurotic symptoms. In this way he shows that this link enables us to understand and treat mental illness in a more individualistic and humane way, in contrast to what had been attempted until then.
The mechanisms that lie behind these normal behaviors were demonstrated operating in what he named "the dreamwork". To name the two most important ones: condensation ( metaphor) and displacement (metonimy).
Unfortunately what caught people's fancies were, mainly, the milenary imagery, euphemisms and symbols for sex and the obscene (easily found in ancient Indian, Arabian or Greek poetry) - which he applied to understand the repressed meaning of the dreams. It's not even necessary to read those very ancient texts to confirm Freud's sources for "dream symbolism". Poems of courtly love abound with "disguised" and "devious" symbols.Shakespeare. Rabelais... What I see in common bt. Freud and VN has no relation to the popular view that invents a "dictionary for symbols" but the grasp of the mechanisms that are peculiar to the "dreamwork" which take place in our ordinary lives and disrupt our plans.
Miale's arguments are in some respects quite similar to those advanced by Blackwell in his article (mentioned above), but Miale's words take this view to extremes all his own when he states that "the oedipus complex functioned as a form of denial" ( where did he get this idea?) "a sanction, of socially accepted pedophilia"...(???).
No one who has read Freud with an unprejudiced view would sustain such an assumption from Freud's books.
Freud was never "vulgar", although freudianists usually are. He was concerned with human conflicts and pain.
But...Yes! Yes! ( at last) to Miale's observation that he liked "the idea of Nabokov as a Freudian, but would caution that it amounts only to a parody.". Of course, and in a way that made him more Freudian than he'd have liked to think.
Search the archive: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/archives/nabokv-l.html
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm