[Nabokov] praises the artist as an encoder of fictional reality, while he condemns the analyst as a false decoder of psychic reality. The issue for Nabokov is not the question of deep reality—his novels are as multilayered as onions and as difficult to peel—but the principle of freedom and control. Anything that impinges upon the artist’s ability to create a self-enclosed and self-determined world becomes a threat to his autonomy. And the major threat lies in the Freudian assertion that man is neither fully aware nor in control of his fears and desires. Nabokov’s reality is generated and sustained by the artist, not the reality unlocked by the analyst. Nothing could be further from Nabokov’s assumptions than a world in which dreams follow psychic, as opposed to artistic, laws and which contain meanings discoverable through the tools of psychoanalysis. Nabokov insists that only the artist can create magical reality; only the artist can lie truthfully. In Pale Fire, Kinbote mentions that “‘reality’ is neither the subject nor the object of true art which creates its own special reality having nothing to do with the average ‘reality’ perceived by the communal eye.” The artist’s deceptions lead to freedom and independence; the psychoanalyst’s deceptions lead to slavery. For Nabokov, the artist is married to creation, the analyst wedded to deconstruction.
Jeffrey Berman, The Talking Cure: Literary Representations of Psychoanalysis (p. 433)