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This long essay is teasing and intriguing because Green juxtaposes Nabokov and Freud, an author whom Nabokov detested. It is as if Freud were Nabokov's double—and we know that Nabokov was inordinately fond of doubles. Nabokov's aversion to Freud “becomes itself a thing Nabokovian, a part of the self that is not the self” (p. 77). The effect is “uncanny,” in Freud's sense, because the distinction between imagination and reality seems to break down, and we
are constantly confronted with the shadowy Other. Nabokov and Freud are a pair, like Humbert Humbert and Quilty in Lolita and Kinbote and Shade in Pale Fire. Freud, too, confessed in the Interpretation of Dreams that his emotional life demanded both an intimate friend and a hated enemy, and the intimate friend often became the hated enemy. Nabokov, therefore, needs his hated Freud in order to define himself.
Green always argues subtly and with understatement, especially by putting passages from Freud and Nabokov side by side and letting the reader draw his own conclusions. Green successfully suggests that Nabokov and Freud are both psychological, self-analyzing authors who create a self that is essentially fictitious. In his carefully constructed interviews, Nabokov worked to project a self different from his fictional characters in its exaggerated normality. But, as Green insists, Nabokov “drafted the image of himself in his interviews as he would a fictional character” (p. 38). Both Freud and Nabokov used writing as a form of self-analysis, in which there is not only the subjective self being analyzed, but also a strong metafictional sense of the writer's awareness of himself conducting the analysis. This attitude tends to reduce the separation between the writer and his fiction because the writer himself is part of his fiction. In this context, the problems faced by the writer are like those faced by the patient in psychoanalysis, and the problems of the reader are like those of the analyst.
Green himself is an a