I just want to toss in a brief follow-up to Joseph Aisenberg's and Jim
Twiggs' comments. Unfortunately, I don't have time to get as involved
in this discussion as I'd like.
In any case--I would warn against assuming that Nabokov didn't know
Freud very well; I can't seek exact locations, but in a letter he
and/or Véra asserted that he read Freud in the original; elsewhere, he
claimed to have read Freud in English.
But I agree with the idea that Nabokov's main opponent was (is) the
popularized Freud, the Freud at large in western culture. The thing
is, the popularized Freud is undeniably real in some way. The
public image of Freud and Freudianism is its own, free-standing
cultural beast (if you will), in part caused by Freud's willingness to
publish some things that seem to authorize that beast's existence. So
to the extent that the Popularized Freud really did have any of the
effects on modern thought that Nabokov seemed to believe it did, he was
pitting himself specifically against that image and its consequences in
the popular imagination, whatever they might be. I see this as very
much akin to his deconstruction of Chernyshevsky's hagiographic image
in chapter four of The Gift, an image which he saw
contributing to Lenin's and Stalin's rise to power. Popular
Conception, independent of textual reality, can have a huge cultural
effect. If Nabokov felt that many of his potential readers might be
swayed in advance by Pop-Freud, then he was also working specifically
against that pop-Freudian voice in his readers. In the
twenties and even into the thirties, when Nabokov was forming his major
artistic commitments, Pop-Freud's presence on the cultural scene was
enormous.
I want to thank all the contributors to this thread, which I'm looking
forward to rereading when I have more time.
Stephen Blackwell