The Psychoanalyst

Throughout Lolita, there is an unexplained extra character: the satirical psychoanalysis. Sometimes, however, Humbert will relay his thoughts, feelings and experiences as if he had been talking to a psychoanalyst. As Nabokov says, and is explicitly shown throughout the introduction, Nabokov hates Freud and psychoanalytical explanations. So, one can only perceive that Nabokov is doing this in a sarcastic way. Nabokov is the type of author who wants to push his readers, as he plays “games” with them, but he will also make fun of something he doesn’t like in such a sly way that it makes the reader almost think he likes it. However, the reader has to know how to read his works to understand the games he is playing. In the following passages, it is easy to see that there is a “satirical psychoanalysis” character. It’s present, but humorous.

1. “The days of my youth, as I look back on them, seem to fly away from me in a flurry of pale repetitive scraps like those morning snow storms of used tissue paper that a train passenger sees whirling in the wake of the observation car. In my sanitary relations with women I was practical, ironical and brisk. While a college student, in London and Paris, paid ladies sufficed me. My studies were meticulous and intense, although no particularly fruitful. At first, I planned to take a degree in psychiatry and many manquè talents do; but I was even more manquè than that; a peculiar exhaustion, I am so oppressed, doctor, set in; and I switched to English literature, where so many frustrated poets end as pipe-smoking teachers in tweeds. Paris suited me. I discussed Soviet movies with expatriates. I sat with uranists in the Deux Magots. I published tortuous essays in obscure journals” (Lolita, 15).

In the first sentence, the character is present. Nabokov uses the opportunity to create an extremely vivid scene in place, while also making fun of the psychoanalyst. Based on how he describes the women his father involves himself with earlier in the novel, we know that Humbert doesn’t have a healthy view on women. When he was younger, women would cue over him all the time, which also spread into his adult life. He never really liked them, but did associate himself with them. As this passage progresses, it is easy to see the bad psychoanalyst; he even mentions he was thinking about studying psychiatry and did for a while. Psychology is present throughout the book linked to Humbert, but especially in the form of psychodynamic therapy.

“I leaf again and again through these miserable memories, and keep asking myself, was it then, in the glitter of that remote summer, that the rift in my life began; or was my excessive desire for that child only the first evidence of an inherent singularity? When I try to analyze my own cravings, motives, actions and so forth, I surrender to a sort of retrospective imagination, which feeds the analytic faculty with boundless alternatives, and which causes each visualized route to fork and re-fork without end in the maddeningly complex prospect of my past. I am convinced, however, that in a certain magic and fateful way Lolita began with Annabel” (Lolita, 12-13).

This passage seems to have the character bleeding through. The similarities that are placed between Lolita and Annabel make it easy to suggest that Lolita is taking the place of Annabel. Since Annabel died so suddenly and at such a young age, he got stuck in romanticizing about her. The bad psychoanalyst would say that Humbert lost his mother at young age, so he grew up without a real mother figure, which was replaced by his aunt, who was crazy. After dealing with the affects of these two women, the girl he falls in love with dies when she is fourteen. He is stuck in the mind of a child and still loves the romanticized idea of the fourteen-year-old Annabel, which directly leads to his obsessions with nymphets. The “magic” he refers to is the skewed vision he has pertaining to Annabel.

“I have reserve for the conclusion of my “Annabel” phase the account of our unsuccessful first tryst” (Lolita, 14).

Any time he has a misfortune, he brings his sorrows back to Annabel. He uses her as an excuse as to why he is the way he is. A psychoanalyst would eat this up, so speak, and the reader could construe this by thinking Nabokov wants to psychoanalyze Humbert. Humbert is a very complicated character, and my making a “satirical psychoanalyst” character; Nabokov made his job of showing the reader Humbert an easy one. By making fun of psychoanalyst, Nabokov made the reader understand Humbert deeply and in slightly humorous way. Nabokov never calls Humbert bad or good, but by having Humbert describe himself in the way he does, it makes the character and reader’s relationship stronger.