SOURCE: “Nabokov and Freud: The Play of Power,” in Modern Fiction Studies, Vol. 30, No. 4, Winter, 1984, pp. 637-50.

In the following essay, Shute analyzes Nabokov's aversion to Freud.

“All My Books Should Be Stamped Freudians, Keep Out,” wrote Nabokov in 1963,¹ and his fiction—as well as his letters, interviews, and essays—bears witness to this sustained struggle against the “Viennese Quack.” From an early glimpse in Bend Sinister [hereafter abbreviated as BS] of “Dr. S. Freud's face and signature” floating at the bottom of the toilet bowl (BS, p. 85) to the baroque refractions of that same image in Ada, Freud's presence has haunted the Nabokovian text—which misses no opportunity to declare its absence. Most critics have dismissed this lifelong polemic as yet another harmless hobbyhorse, the favorite foible of a notoriously opinionated author. Yet Nabokov clearly felt that the stakes were much higher, and, in the persistent competition...