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Re: Nabokov and Freud
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Subject: [ http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~deladur/Nabokov_and_%20Freud.pdf] ...Those who engage in the study of Nabokov-Freud may jump from one level of discourse onto another, without realizing any discrepancy. For example, in psychoanalysis, "resistance" is an expression of "transference," and it is, always, an unconscious process. This signification is at variance from Leland Durantaye's use of this word in his concluding sentence of his article (meaning "opposition"), although it remains vaguely acceptable in the first one line: "It is neither possible nor necessary to judge - as so many of Nabokov's critic and defenders have endeavored to do - whether Nabokov's resistance to Freud was determined or overdetermined by factors or feelings of which he was not aware. What Nabokov very consciously sought to counteract were approaches to art that, in their aspiration to uncover the general, neglected the particular. And this he found in Freud. For Nabokov, the essence of art dwells in the details of a work, and any system that encouraged the study of such details as a means to any other end than art itself was, understandably, anathema. This, more than anything else, motivated his resistance to psychoanalysis and its founder." ...overlooked by those who focus on Freud's "discovery" of psychoanalysis.... Freud tried to establish the importance of discoveries which resulted from one particular case (one case history, for example), because its revelatory uniqueness excludes standard research procedures that apply control groups and statistics.
JM: In need of further explicitation: (a) Durantaye's employ of the word "resistance," to indicate a clear-cut standard "opposition" (in his concluding line of my quote), was contaminated by the meanings that are present in the opening sentence of the same quote. If he had not set down "Nabokov's resistance to Freud was overdetermined by ...feelings...unaware of...(etc)" then "resistance" would not implicate psychoanalysis and unconscious motivations.
(b) There are many points that, at first sight at least, reveal a similar scientific ideal motivating both Nabokov and Freud! (nb: I have no authority on what I'm outlining here but I'm daring to expose these thoughts in the hope that my arguments serve as a starting point for a discussion, in our Nab-L, among the "experts")
I read that Nabokov was "a splitter" (the word "analysis" also suggests splits) and, if I understood this information, instead of unifying diverse butterflies under the same generic label, Nabokov championed their appurtenance to varied assortments of distinct species (I hope I got it right!). I suspect that this indicates that Nabokov was fascinated, not only by diversity and individual details but by how these details demonstrate how life is constantly renewing itself in the process of interaction with the environment. Life would be amplifying diversity and developping more and more details from a common (common) matrix, ad infinitum (who knows?). And this positioning is like Freud's, in a way.
Freud had to find a unifying, generic, reference (the universality of the Oedipus conflict, the "phallus", how patterns of language interact with the unconscious processes) from which he could depart to study individual variations as they fan-out according to social and natural pressures. These variations should not be reduced to their general point of origin, although their diverging paths could only be discerned by having them refer to it. If Freud considered Art as an expression of "what is humanity," to establish what are the elements in it which it shares with dreams, jokes, racionalization, abstraction and even fabulations and lies, his conclusions are to be understood as valid only for their "scientific" importance, not as diluting the powers of an artistic individual achievement. Freud was mainly intent on pain and its relief, as a doctor. His research being limited, because he wouldn't use people as if they'd been guineapigs, he chose to depart from jokes, slips, dreams and passionate love (transference love as it takes place in a psychoanalytic session) for they were, in his eyes, "normal states of madness" shared by mankind, in order to investigate the parallels between such "abnormally normal sates" (which served as his reference points) and those he found in mentally afflicted subjects.
Alexey Sklyarenko "...Soviet writer (People, Years, Life, 1966; Book Three, chapter 2) Ilya Ehrenburg: "The son of the Constitutional Democrate Nabokov, who was killed by an ultra-monarchist, is now one of America's most widely-read writers; he wrote at first in Russian, then in French, now he writes in English."
In an interview Nabokov called Ehrenburg (1891-1967) 'a talented journalist and a big sinner'."
JM: I rushed to learn more about Ehrenburg to find out what might prompted Nabokov to say he was "a big sinner" ( I reached no conclusion!). I read that although he spent several years in France (where he made friends with Picasso and French writers) he never gave up, as a writer, Russia and the Russian language. In his varied allegiances and moves, there was one certainty: he always opposed all kinds of tyranny and anti-semitic policies. Ehrenburg's succint description of Vladimir Nabokov as "the son of the Constitutional Democrate Nabokov" (he didn't name either Dmitri or Vladimir but certainly indicated who was "his" Nabokov?), a successful author in America and who wrote in Russian, French and English... is not a neutral observation but a rather critical one. Or so it seems to me. Perhaps this is where he sinned?
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JM: In need of further explicitation: (a) Durantaye's employ of the word "resistance," to indicate a clear-cut standard "opposition" (in his concluding line of my quote), was contaminated by the meanings that are present in the opening sentence of the same quote. If he had not set down "Nabokov's resistance to Freud was overdetermined by ...feelings...unaware of...(etc)" then "resistance" would not implicate psychoanalysis and unconscious motivations.
(b) There are many points that, at first sight at least, reveal a similar scientific ideal motivating both Nabokov and Freud! (nb: I have no authority on what I'm outlining here but I'm daring to expose these thoughts in the hope that my arguments serve as a starting point for a discussion, in our Nab-L, among the "experts")
I read that Nabokov was "a splitter" (the word "analysis" also suggests splits) and, if I understood this information, instead of unifying diverse butterflies under the same generic label, Nabokov championed their appurtenance to varied assortments of distinct species (I hope I got it right!). I suspect that this indicates that Nabokov was fascinated, not only by diversity and individual details but by how these details demonstrate how life is constantly renewing itself in the process of interaction with the environment. Life would be amplifying diversity and developping more and more details from a common (common) matrix, ad infinitum (who knows?). And this positioning is like Freud's, in a way.
Freud had to find a unifying, generic, reference (the universality of the Oedipus conflict, the "phallus", how patterns of language interact with the unconscious processes) from which he could depart to study individual variations as they fan-out according to social and natural pressures. These variations should not be reduced to their general point of origin, although their diverging paths could only be discerned by having them refer to it. If Freud considered Art as an expression of "what is humanity," to establish what are the elements in it which it shares with dreams, jokes, racionalization, abstraction and even fabulations and lies, his conclusions are to be understood as valid only for their "scientific" importance, not as diluting the powers of an artistic individual achievement. Freud was mainly intent on pain and its relief, as a doctor. His research being limited, because he wouldn't use people as if they'd been guineapigs, he chose to depart from jokes, slips, dreams and passionate love (transference love as it takes place in a psychoanalytic session) for they were, in his eyes, "normal states of madness" shared by mankind, in order to investigate the parallels between such "abnormally normal sates" (which served as his reference points) and those he found in mentally afflicted subjects.
Alexey Sklyarenko "...Soviet writer (People, Years, Life, 1966; Book Three, chapter 2) Ilya Ehrenburg: "The son of the Constitutional Democrate Nabokov, who was killed by an ultra-monarchist, is now one of America's most widely-read writers; he wrote at first in Russian, then in French, now he writes in English."
In an interview Nabokov called Ehrenburg (1891-1967) 'a talented journalist and a big sinner'."
JM: I rushed to learn more about Ehrenburg to find out what might prompted Nabokov to say he was "a big sinner" ( I reached no conclusion!). I read that although he spent several years in France (where he made friends with Picasso and French writers) he never gave up, as a writer, Russia and the Russian language. In his varied allegiances and moves, there was one certainty: he always opposed all kinds of tyranny and anti-semitic policies. Ehrenburg's succint description of Vladimir Nabokov as "the son of the Constitutional Democrate Nabokov" (he didn't name either Dmitri or Vladimir but certainly indicated who was "his" Nabokov?), a successful author in America and who wrote in Russian, French and English... is not a neutral observation but a rather critical one. Or so it seems to me. Perhaps this is where he sinned?
Search archive with Google:
http://www.google.com/advanced_search?q=site:listserv.ucsb.edu&HL=en
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
Visit "Nabokov Online Journal:" http://www.nabokovonline.com
Manage subscription options: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/