Viennese Waltz: Freud in Nabokov's Despair

A LTHOUGH NABOKOV DISMISSED FREUD as a trivial and vulgar thinker Ji\. and derided him at every turn, the presence of Freud and Freudianism is quite conspicuous in his works. From Mary to Lolita to Ada the reader encounters the "Viennese witch doctor" and his delegation time and again. The bearded psychiatrist in The Defense who counsels Luzhin after his breakdown, John Ray Jr., Ph.D. (Humbert's editor in Lolita), analyst Dr. Rosetta Stone from Pnin, and the chief psychiatrist at the "Psykitsch" asylum in Ada (Dr. Sig Heiler) these are some of the costumes in which Nabokov cloaks his "favorite figure of fun." Not only did Nabokov deny any Freudian influence on his novels, but he also adamantly rejected the Freudian interpretive framework as such. His edict that his own works be spared a Freudian reading is enforced by a surfeit of interpretive traps set for Freudians within the pages of his novels. With great vigilance, Nabokov anticipates and short-circuits potential Freudian interpretations of his work through parody, travesty, and psychoanalytic pastiche. Indeed, a complex relationship obtains between Nabokov and the object of his parody: a one-sided partnership in which Freud becomes "Freud," a Nabokovian construction that is part caricature and part straw man. Despite Nabokov's attempts to deny legitimacy to any connection between his work and Freud's, scholars have endeavored to understand the Freudian presence in his writing.2 Phyllis Roth was a pioneer in the effort to come to terms