''Vladimir Nabokov's Comic Quest for Reality' - Nottingham eTheses

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rence of anything that smacks of Freudian psychoanalysis
is suspicious of all this from the very start,
and this suspicion soon proves to be justified when
it becomes clear what Humbert's own reaction to it is.
On the two occasions on which he gets involved with
it he reveals the same attitude to psychoanalysis as
his inventor. Insane though he is, he still sees
through what he regards as complete nonsense, and it
becomes for him a source of gleeful enjoyment. He first
realizes on what shaky ground it stands when, on some
obscure expedition, he is supposed to record the psychic
reactions of his comrades, gets bored with his task and
just makes up a perfectly spurious report, only to find
it accepted and printed in some scientific magazine.
He finds the same readiness on the part of the doctors
to believe anything, when he himself becomes the object
of psychoanalysis. No matter what he tells them, it is
solemnly accepted as true, analysed with equal solemnity
and eventually made to yield such absurd and hilarious
diagnoses that Humbert is in the end not cured by the
treatment he receives but by the endless fun he derives
from it all. He leaves the sanatorium a saner man
than the psychiatrists, whom he has so frightened with
his invented dreams that they, "the dream-extortionists,
dream and wake up shrieking" (36).
With Freudian methods thus once more reduced to
humbug, there can be no question of taking Humbert's
"analysis" of his "case" seriously. Even by providing
a psychoanalytical explanation in spite of what his
attitude to this sort of approach is, he ridicules it,