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Daily Inspiration Quote by Vladimir Nabokov

"I cannot conceive how anybody in his right mind should go to a psychoanalyst"

About this Quote

Nabokov’s jab lands with the cool precision of a novelist who mistrusted systems that claim to decode the soul like a lock. “In his right mind” is the switchblade here: it pretends to defend sanity while implying that seeking psychoanalysis is itself a symptom. The insult is doing double duty, mocking both the patient (neurotic enough to go) and the analyst (credulous enough to play priest with a couch).

The intent isn’t just anti-therapy crankiness; it’s aesthetic self-defense. Nabokov wrote from a fierce belief in individual consciousness, in the irreducible particularity of memory, sensation, and style. Psychoanalysis, especially in its mid-century cultural dominance, threatened to flatten that richness into prefab narratives: Oedipal scripts, symbolic substitutions, trauma-as-master-key. For a writer obsessed with the singular detail, the Freudian habit of translating life into “case material” reads like bad reading: reductive, moralizing, impatient with ambiguity.

The subtext is also power. Analysts interpret; patients submit. Nabokov, famously allergic to authority and fond of controlling the terms of attention, recoils at a relationship where another person gets to declare what your dreams “really” mean. Coming from a Russian emigre who watched ideologies posture as total explanations, the skepticism carries historical bite: grand theories promise clarity, then demand compliance.

It’s a line that works because it’s funny and unfair in the same breath. Nabokov isn’t arguing; he’s asserting taste. Psychoanalysis becomes, to him, not medicine but kitsch metaphysics - a story factory that competes with art and loses.

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TopicWitty One-Liners
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APA Style (7th ed.)
Nabokov, Vladimir. (2026, January 15). I cannot conceive how anybody in his right mind should go to a psychoanalyst. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/i-cannot-conceive-how-anybody-in-his-right-mind-16301/

Chicago Style
Nabokov, Vladimir. "I cannot conceive how anybody in his right mind should go to a psychoanalyst." FixQuotes. January 15, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/i-cannot-conceive-how-anybody-in-his-right-mind-16301/.

MLA Style (9th ed.)
"I cannot conceive how anybody in his right mind should go to a psychoanalyst." FixQuotes, 15 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/i-cannot-conceive-how-anybody-in-his-right-mind-16301/. Accessed 11 Feb. 2026.

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About the Author

Vladimir Nabokov

Vladimir Nabokov (April 22, 1899 - July 2, 1977) was a Novelist from USA.

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