Vladimir Nabokov

NABOKV-L post 0014231, Thu, 30 Nov 2006 17:02:59 -0200

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Re: "C" "K" "S" in PF solution (tongue-twisters)
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There is also strangely PF-relevant (and Zemblan-sounding) Russian tongtwister: "Karl u Klary ukral korally" (Karl stole Klara's corals)...crown jewels?
Victor Fet
I offer in return: SHUT UP THE SHUTTERS AND SIT IN THE SHOP! (S K-B) where "she sells sea shells from the sea shore" ? (JM)
Stan Kelly-Bootle noted: ..." Elsewhere (Number 143) Horgan knocks the Freudian postulates as confusing: " ... none more than his attempts to identify recognizable reality through dreams. This has too often resulted in efforts to create systematic interpretations of essentially inconsistent subject matter. If there should be clinical usefulness in this process, it has nothing to contribute to an artist's realization of his aesthetic impulse." He concludes rhetorically with signs of more sympathy for Herr Doktor than I've encountered with VN:"Was Freud himself more of an artist than a therapist? Were his insights more like those of poetry than of science?"

Why do people return to such dated views on Freud who is now, alas, also forgotten by most modern psychoanalysts?
(I suggest that those who are annoyed simplified and repetitious comments on Freud stop right here.)

S K-B, clinical psychoanalysis is only possible if someone feels some kind of "transference" towards a psychoanalyst ( be it love, hate, fear, admiration, depreciation). The "systematic interpretations of essentially inconsistent subject matter" refers to a subject's idiosincratic field of experience that constitute part of his unique symptom. When I recognize an ever-recurrent debunking of Freud I may find a pattern of repetition that may be connected to this person's various, "inconsistent" signs or expressions, before I can reach a "consistent" psychoanalytic interpretation - which shall be completely useless if the person in question is not my patient.

Were Freud's insights closer to poetry than to science?
Freudian discoveries pertain to the vast domain of language. When he described thought-processes as occurring incessantly, even during sleep, he was proposing something very revolutionary at his time ( now we may agree, like Doyle's Dr.Watson, to what appears to us as quite obvious).
Beside our conscious logic thoughts, there are other kinds of thinking which occurr simultaneously - and these are submitted to what Freud called the "primary process". It is when a regression from word to image-presentation takes place, following condensation(metaphor) and displacement (metonimy). Isn't the ability to bring these primitive, emotionally charged images, back to rational thought/words, similar to what takes place in inspired poetry?
Freud's visions may have been poetic, but he followed a scientist's discipline to build his worlds and to develop theories which influenced, although now dissolved in, the mainstream of our modern thinking.
Jansy

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