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This delightful book is a tribute by a talented and witty first-time author to the great writer Vladimir Nabokov. Her book celebrates Nabokov's life and works. She appreciates and evokes the great writer, stressing his capacity for joy and happiness not only from her own perceptive descriptions but by wonderful quotations from his writings.
Although she was only four months old when Nabokov died, Zanganeh (I will henceforth call her Z) has identified with, and idealized, him—seeing him both as a model from her recent past and as a parental figure—what Freud would call her “ego ideal.”
Psychoanalysts regard Freud as their “ego ideal.” Nabokov despised psychoanalysis; he often did not deign to use Freud's name but would repeatedly attack him sarcastically in the prefaces of many of his novels as “The Viennese Master” (a repetitive negative powerful reactive response to a kind of negative “ego ideal.”)
I feel Z has both transferred and projected her psychically internalized parents onto Nabokov. Because everyone is subject to the wish to murder one's parents—the part of the Oedipus complex that we all have a tendency to minimize and deny—it can be easier to idealize and/or demonize a great already-dead person from the past to deflect murderous wishes away from our much-needed parents.
The parricidal wishes amount to terror for the small child. The terror is frequently not retained in responsible consciousness but is always latently present in the unconscious mind in relation to godlike parents whom the child feels (and the adult continues to feel) he or she cannot live without. This makes for a trauma-laden lurking psychic danger for all of us. We all subsequently are prone to idealizing and demonizing parental figures. And it is safest if these idealized parental figures are already dead. What we all find most difficult is to hate, and at the same time feel that we love and cannot live without, parents—a defensive need to keep these emotions split off begins in early infa