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In my twenties and early thirties, I did not understand my throes quite so clearly. While my body knew what it craved for, my mind rejected my body's every plea. One moment I was ashamed and frightened, another recklessly optimistic. Taboos strangulated me. Psychoanalysts wooed me with pseudoliberations of pseudolibidoes.
In Part One, Chapter 5, Humbert explains to readers the intricacies of his attraction to nymphets, and he admits that it took him a long time to truly make sense of his desires. This quotation in particular emphasizes the uselessness of seeking professional help from psychiatrists, suggesting that their analyses may have caused Humbert even more confusion and frustration. The false cures that these psychiatrists proposed to Humbert in his youth drive him to look down upon the entire profession.
I discovered there was an endless source of robust enjoyment in trifling with psychiatrists: cunningly leading them on; never letting them see that you know all the tricks of the trade; inventing for them elaborate dreams, pure classics in style (which make them, the dream-extortionists, dream and wake up shrieking); teasing them with fake "primal scenes"; and never allowing them the slightest glimpse of one's real sexual predicament.
Humbert finds himself in yet another sanatorium in Part One, Chapter 9 as a result of a mental breakdown, and he explains that tricking his doctors, rather than their care, was what ultimately improved his mood. The ease with which Humbert manipulates the psychiatrists reflects poorly on their intelligence, an ironic outcome given their profession. By providing this anecdote, Humbert aims to diminish the credibility of psychiatry as a field of study and emphasize its limitations.
The child therapist in me (a fake, as most of them are—but no matter) regurgitated neo-Freudian hash and conjured up a dreaming and exaggerating Dolly in the "latency" period of girlhood.
This quotation, which appears in Part One, Chapter 28, offers yet another example of the judgmental digs that Humbert takes at the field of psychiatry throughout the novel. He mocks both the expertise of child therapists as well as the prominence of Sigmund Freud’s theories, implying that neither one can fully account for the reality of his relationship with Lolita. This argument serves as the groundwork for Humbert’s assertions that he is a far more complex and mysterious man than psychiatry’s clinical definition of insanity can account for.
