4: Dolores, Psychology, and Survivors

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Trigger warning. This podcast involves discussions of child sexual abuse
and pedophilia. Listener discretion is advised. In ninety eight, Sally
Horner was a fifth grader in Camden, New Jersey, who
tried to shoplift a notebook from a corner store on
a dare. She took the notebook, got to the door,
and then felt a hand on her arm. This was

(00:21):
the hand of a grown man who said he was
an FBI officer and that she could get in big
trouble and be sent to a reform school for doing
something like that. He said he'd let her off this time,
but he'd always be watching. Sally's mother was a widow.
Her father had died by suicide when Sally was only six,
something they never discussed in the household. The family was poor,

(00:42):
but Sally was a bright and kind young girl, and
she didn't see the man who said he was an
FBI agent for months after that, But then he turned
up again in June. He reminded her of what she'd done,
the crime of stealing a notebook, and then said that
the government insisted that she go to Atlantic City with him.
She was eleven and confused, and this is long before

(01:05):
stranger danger, ever, becomes a popular conversation in schools, so
she agrees. She promises not to tell her mother the
real nature of why she's leaving. The man said that
he would call Sally's mom, Ella, saying that he was
the father of a classmate of hers and all Sally
had to do was not correct him. Ella would later
say that she was concerned about the offer, but was

(01:26):
happy that Sally might get a chance to have a vacation,
something that her mother wasn't able to provide. So on
June four, Ella brought Sally to the bus station to
go to Atlantic City, sitting next to a man who
Ellen never met personally. She would not see her daughter
for twenty one months because the man Sally went with
was not an FBI agent. He was a man named

(01:49):
Frank Losal, a fifty year old mechanic who had just
been released from prison six months before and had a
marked history of molesting girls between the ages of eleven
and fourteen. Sally wrote to her mother and called from
Atlantic City for the week she was scheduled to be there,
then asked her mother if she could stay longer. After
three weeks, Sally stopped contacting her mother until the end

(02:09):
of July, at which point Sally said she was going
to Baltimore with the man who called himself Mr. Warner.
She told Ella she wouldn't be contacting her anymore. Frank
Lassal brought Sally Horner to Baltimore from there, raping her
regularly and ensuring her silence by saying that she would
be found out for shoplifting if she didn't do what
he wanted. Ella reported Sally missing back in New Jersey,

(02:33):
and the story made waves locally, but lost steam after
several months with no developments. I didn't know about Sally's
story until pretty recently. It was written about in detail
in the book The Real Lolita, A Lost Girl, A
salacious crime, and a scandalous masterpiece by writer Sarah Winman,

(02:53):
who's written about Lolita quite a bit over the years,
and who will be interviewing in this episode. I don't
believe that Lauras and Sally are one and the same
by any stretch, but given that Sally Horners lived experiences
took place around the exact same time that the fictional
Dolores He was abducted by Humbert Humbert, I think her
story is very relevant here in Baltimore, LaSalle entered Sally

(03:17):
into a Catholic school under a different name, and they
stayed there for six months as he continued to intimidate
and assault her. By early Camden police had figured out
who LaSalle was, charged him with kidnapping, and LaSalle took
Sally and fled to Dallas, Texas. At this point, Sally
still believed LaSalle was an FBI agent and was terrified

(03:39):
of him. They moved to a trailer park and Sally
was enrolled in a different Catholic school, befriending the kids
and eventually the mother of a family living in a
nearby trailer. The mother's name is Ruth. Sally doesn't reveal
anything about her relationship to the man she was instructed
to call her father, but Ruth was suspicious. So when
Ruth's family moved to San Jose, California, Ruth wrote to

(04:02):
LaSalle and told him that he could get some work
there in the hopes that she could keep an eye
on Sally. Sally confessed how LaSalle had sex with her
regularly to a classmate, and her classmate said that they
should stop. This, of course, was rape, but Sally didn't
have the tools to understand that at this time. Sally
went on to tell an investigator later that she quote

(04:23):
began to reject his advances after that unquote. In early
nineteen fifty, Sally is still missing and LaSalle brings her
to San Jose, California, where they reconnect with Ruth's family.
Sally comes clean, telling Ruth about LaSalle's criminal behavior. According
to Wineman's book, Ruth too was a complicated figure, a

(04:43):
hero in Sally's life, but was emotionally abusive to her
own children. Ruth has Sally call her older sister back
in New Jersey. Sally has taken to a children's center,
and LaSalle, in spite of the fact that he continued
to insist he was Sally's biological father for years, was
a rested, but Sally couldn't go home to her mother
until she had been questioned by the police. She wasn't

(05:05):
comfortable discussing how LaSalle sexually abused her at first, but
eventually said that it had happened countless times. Finally, a
few weeks before her thirteenth birthday, Sally has returned home.
Twenty one months later, LaSalle was convicted under the Man
Act or the White Slave Traffic Act, sworn into law

(05:25):
in nineteen By the nineteen forties, it's more popularly called
the Man Act, likely because referring to it by Man
after politician James Robert Mann, who introduced the Act on
the Senate floor, avoids facing the implications of its alternate
name and the laws often racist application of it. So
a quick but important digression here. We've referenced this law

(05:49):
in early episodes since Humbert Humbert invokes the name of
the Man Act as well, So a brief note on
its history here. Well. The law itself detailed that it
was a quote for the purpose of prostitution or debauchery,
or for any other immoral purpose unquote. While it was
used to prosecute kidnappers, it was equally used to punish

(06:10):
sex workers and to criminalize interracial relationships of any kind,
with the Act being deployed to punish black men in particular.
While this law worked in favor of Sally Horner receiving justice,
it certainly did not mean that for everyone. Early in
the law's history, in nine twelve, a man named Jack Johnson,
who was the first black American to hold the heavyweight title,

(06:33):
was said to have violated the Man Attack for kidnapping
heavy quotes here a white woman whom he had married,
named Lucille Cameron. Given the fact that this was a
very consensual relationship, Cameron refused to cooperate, and Johnson was
brought to court under the Man Act again in nineteen
for involvement with a white sex worker, and this time

(06:54):
he was convicted under an all white jury, later serving
a year in prison. He wasn't hardened until over seventy
years after his death in Now there's a lot more
to say with that example alone, But all of this
to say, some have been taken to court over the
Man Act over legitimate abuse of women and children. But
it was a law conceived during the nonsense white slavery

(07:18):
panic of the early twentieth century and has been used
for prejudiced and revenge based instances extensively as well. The
Man Act is still in law today, was part of
the reason that Elizabeth Smart's captor was put in jail
and was last amended under George W. Bush. For more
in the troubling history of this law, I will link

(07:39):
a piece to the notes of this episode. There's definitely
more to learn. Okay, let's get back to Sally Horner's story.
Frank Lassalle pleads guilty and turns down any legal defense,
although he would later appeal. But we're talking about Sally here.
She and her family were offered the chance to leave Camden,
New Jersey and live under assumed names somewhere else, but

(08:02):
Ellie refuses. Sally just wanted to return to her life.
But doing this isn't so easy because once Sally is discovered,
the details of her case are made national and the
fact that she was sexually abused is on the front
page of newspapers. So Sally, going back to the same
school she went to prior to being abducted, struggles. The

(08:22):
family barely speaks of the incident. She receives limited to
no mental health care, and experiences bullying from her peers,
but Sally pulls through. She makes a close friend, and
in August ninety two, at age fifteen, she goes to
the Jersey Shore with her friend for the weekend, and
it's here that she meets an older boy twenty years old,
and Sally lies about her age, saying that she's seventeen.

(08:45):
It's all pretty innocent, and he offers her a ride
home at night and On the way home, they get
into a car crash that kills Sally Horner at age fifteen.
Losal goes on to live in prison for over ten
years afterward. Once a media sensation, the Associated Press had
little to say about Sally upon her death. Florence Sally Horner,
a fifteen year old Camden, New Jersey girl who spent

(09:07):
twenty one months as the captive of a middle aged
morals offender a few years ago, was killed in a
highway accident when the car in which she was riding
plowed into the rear of a parked truck. Starting the
same year, Sally Horner was abducted by Frank LaSalle. Vladimir
Nabokov begins work on what would become his most famous novel, Lolita.
He writes a first draft of the novel out on

(09:29):
large note cards, along with notes, reference points, and ideas
for future drafts in the corner of one card. This
is found August nineteen fifty two, Woodbine, New Jersey. Sally Horner,
fifteen year old Camden, New Jersey girl who spent twenty
one months as the captive of a middle aged morals
offender a few years ago, was killed in a highway

(09:51):
mishap early Monday. Sally vanished from her Camden home in
nineteen forty eight and wasn't heard from again until nineteen fifty,
when she told a harrowing story of spending twenty one
months as the cross country slave of Frank less Alto Lasal,
a mechanic, was arrested in San Jose, California. He pleaded
guilty to two charges of kidnapping and was sentenced to

(10:13):
thirty to thirty five years in prison. He was branded
as a moral leper by the sentencing judge, and in
the published draft of Lolita, Chapter thirty three, Part two,
Humbert Humbert says, this had I done to Dolly, perhaps
what Frank LaSalle, a fifty year old mechanic, had done
to eleven year old Sally Horner. In Sally Horner and

(10:35):
Dolores Hayes are not the same person. And we know
Nabukof never intended this because he had been trying to
write a story with a plot like Lolita for over
ten years before Sally was ever abducted. But we know
that she was on his mind, and that she dies
sixteen months before the manuscript is ever finished. This is
Lolita Podcast. M H. Welcome back to Lolita Podcast. I

(11:28):
am your host, Jamie Loftus, and in this episode, we're
going to take a closer look not only at some
of the real life cases of abduction and abuse that
Nabokov pulled from to write Lolita, but how the world
viewed these crimes at the time, where psychoanalysis was at
the time of Lolita's publication, and where professionals are today

(11:48):
in terms of treating survivors of the kind of abuse
suffered by Sally Horner and by Dolores Hayes in the
pages of Lolita. Quick note here, I know there's an
ongoing discussion on the myriad words used to describe those
who have experienced abuse. I'm aware of this dialogue. I'm
going to use the word survivor in this series because

(12:09):
that's what I've used in my own personal experience, but
it is an ongoing dialogue that we should be paying
attention to. We're also going to be speaking to those
who have experienced abuse while under age and their complicated
relationships with this text and of course with these issues.
This was a heavy, challenging episode to put together, and
I really, really really appreciate the time and care to

(12:30):
those I interviewed in answering my questions. Dolores Hayes, while
a fictional character, has an experienced reflective of a lot
of real life people, and they deserve the space in
this discourse. They always have, and I think Nabakov would
agree on that. But we see it so rarely discussed
and never discussed in our popular culture. So this week
I'd like to listen more than talk, because there's a

(12:53):
lot to unpack here. While I'm a survivor of sexual
abuse myself, I'm very lucky to not have been subjected
to abuse as a child, and we're going to spend
this episode talking to readers of Lolita who have experienced
and survived abuse and the professionals who have dedicated their
careers to working with survivors in a responsible way. Within
these conversations are some cases for reclaiming Lolita as a

(13:16):
text that is useful for those who have been sexually
abused and those looking for insight into what abuse at
the hands of someone who is supposed to be caring
for you can be like, as well as a case
for the opposite. But first, let's talk a little more
about Sally Horner. She wasn't the sole inspiration for Dolores Hayes.
We know that Nabulkov was interested in exploring this topic

(13:39):
and fiction as early as before Sally was even born.
There are strong indicators that the tragedies that befell Sally
down to her tragic death at the age of fifteen,
three years to the day before Lolita was published, had
an influence on certain points in the book. And here's
why that matters. This is a bit of my conversation
with the author of the Real Alita, the kidnapping of

(14:02):
Sally Horner and the novel that scandalized the world, Sarah Winman.
So I remember looking at this note card in Nabokov's files,
and it had a list of music from nineteen fifty
that um Dolores would be listening to, and it was
very funny. It's like Peggy Lee and so I think
maybe Perry Como was on there, and Tony Bennett was

(14:23):
definitely on there. And it's so funny because that's seventy
years ago. So we think that that's such old these music,
but at the time it was fresh and contemporary. And
it's this idea of the making of the American teenager.
There are also some similarities in terms of some of
the details that I think at one point Humbered references

(14:48):
a case that's very similar to the actual happenings of
Sally's kidnapping, but transposed to some of the ages and
talks about a nine year old girl who was abducted,
and obviously just mentioning the fact like Frank's name and
that he was a mechanic. It's right there the news

(15:08):
media of this time, at the time of Sally Horner's disappearance.
I would love to dig into that a little bit more.
How does that get to how we cover comparable cases
now but at this time, at the time of our disappearance,
how is it covered in the media Later on after
her rescue, when the coverage would be much more extensive,
there were these whispers that, well, why did Ella let

(15:31):
Sally go off and then didn't notice anything for several weeks.
And the thing that I tried to impress and my
retelling of the story is that Ella was poor. She
had bet a lot of baggage of her own secrets
that she was keeping. She could barely keep the lights on,
she had trouble holding onto a job, and for Sally
the idea that a week's vacation in Atlantic City that

(15:55):
was more than Ella could ever offer. So I can see,
or I can try to understand and empathize why she
made what is clearly a poor decision. And so because
she had been speaking with the sheriff and he had
asked her if she had had sex with Frank Glassel,
they wouldn't have used the term rape um whether even

(16:18):
though it is accurate. I think it's just important to
clarify that when you're dealing with history, going by the
phrasing that they use and then contextualizing it is super important.
And the sheriff had asked, and at first she denied it,
but then she admitted it after some careful, gentle coaxing.

(16:40):
And this statement was reprinted on the front page of
the Career Post, above the fold, and it was essentially
Sally's testimony. So on the one hand it was really jarring,
But on the other hand, it was the only time that,
with a couple of exceptions, where I had Sally's voice,
even though it was in the sort of official mode.

(17:00):
So the fact that she said in the statement, I
want to come home as soon as I can like
that was just so it just like got me right
in the heart, and I knew that if it got me,
it would also get readers as well. So I think
that ultimately the coverage was as good as it was
going to get. But I think that with our very

(17:22):
careful and practiced eye, there are a lot of grounds
for criticism and for how it could have been better.
I mean, you didn't have a lot of television, you
had some radio, you had a lot more newspapers, so
as a result, you didn't have this wall to wall
twenty four, our cable madness, and now with social media
it just feels like all we do is consume media.

(17:43):
But seven years ago, the whole point was you picked
up a paper, you listen to radio, you talked, You
talked to the people in town. So, if anything, the
coverage of Sally's rescue was a lot better than how
the people of Camden viewed Sally, and that's why she
had such a tough time sort of re orienting herself.

(18:07):
So they stayed in the same house, Sally went back
to the same school with the same people, all of
whom had read the coverage and knew exactly what happened
to her. And arrived at the conclusion that instead of
being a victim of sexual assault abuse, that she had
willingly given up her virginity to a much older man.
And were there any mental health services or counseling made

(18:30):
available to her. Even if there had been, I don't
think that it would ever have occurred to Ella to
pursue that. For Sally, it just wasn't done. And I
remember talking with al Pinero, her brother in law, when
he was still alive, and Diana Jamingo, who was Sally's niece,
who was born only a couple of months after Sally's abduction,

(18:54):
so she was just about two when Sally came back
and I asked her, was like, was there any was
therapy a thing that your family did? And she shook
her head and said, no, just you never talked about it.
She didn't even find out the whole truth of what
happened to Sally until well into her teens, So it
just wasn't discussed. Their world was smaller, not necessarily limited,

(19:19):
but just smaller than the worlds that we have at
our disposal. Post traumatic stress disorder wasn't even a term
in ninety and so what is your hope? What what
do you hope that people take away for knowing Sally
Horner's story. I think it just it comes back to
knowing Sally Horner's story not only gives context for this

(19:43):
iconic and to my mind, yes, one of the great
American novels of the twentieth century, but it also gives
context for how we understand how trauma works and what
value all of our lives have, and that we shouldn't
necessarily brush people aside just because they don't fit particular

(20:04):
modes of victimhood that we think that. I think the
last few years in particular have really shown that. I
hope that we have expanded our ability to understand that
processing trauma is a complicated endeavor. It's a symmetrical it
doesn't happen in a linear form. It doesn't happen on

(20:26):
a schedule that you want. It's very, to my mind,
very correlated with grief and the sort of like stop
start feeling that that happens. And it's just mostly I
just want people to feel like Sally's was an interesting person,
and by interesting person, just that her very existence was

(20:49):
interesting and that was really important to me that Sally
partner her life mattered as her life, but also as
maybe not a stand in per se, but just that
it was, you know, I just I wanted her to
be immortal. I guess that's kind of what any writer

(21:12):
is doing when they're reviving interest in someone who has
overlooked and neglected. I think one thing that was really
important to me for Sally's part of the book was
I kept running into all sorts of complicated women. Between
Ella and Ruth Janish, the woman who engineered her rescue

(21:34):
as one of her children told me she she did
the best that she knew how with what she had,
And I think that's really important and understanding why unfortunately
people abuse their own children. It's because it's a model
that they have learned, perhaps from their own family. And
it can be really, really difficult to undo what you've

(21:55):
known as a child, and it's like encoded into your
body and your brain, and you have to work so
hard to get past that, and many people are able
to do it, and many people are not. And I
think we just have to give people the emotional and
psychological tools to break cycles. And it's really important that

(22:16):
the more of these stories that are out there, the
more we can expand our understanding It might be a
difficult thing to say right now, and the country is
so polarized, but I'm enough of an optimist to think
that there are ways to expand and bridge our ability
to understand one another. Thank you so much to Sarah
Wineman for her time, and you can check out The

(22:37):
Real Lolita wherever books are sold. I also highly recommend
for writing about Sue Lyon that was published earlier this year.
We discussed that last week and will continue to in
a future episode. So as deeply painful as it can be,

(23:05):
I think that discussing comparable real life cases to Lolita
is critical to understanding the text itself, and so is
understanding how the conversations around this topic have changed over
the years. As a starting point, abduction cases as they
were covered in Sally Horner and Dolores Hayes's time centers
abused girls and women who are white almost exclusively, an

(23:28):
instance of cultural and media driven racism that's still with
us now. Look at a list of Dateline episodes, look
at iconic true crime stories that we give space to,
look at the cult stories that we elect to cover
in depth. It doesn't make the abuse any less scarring,
but there are wide swaths of stories concerning the sexual
abuse of non white people with an emphasis on black, brown,

(23:51):
and Indigenous people that are discussed less or not at
all in a larger cultural way. I highly recommend a
piece from The Appeal called The Enduring, Pernicious Whiteness of
True Crime by Elon Green as a start. Another thing
to keep in mind is that the study of childhood
sexual trauma is still relatively young, even now, having come

(24:13):
into the public consciousness in the early nineteen hundreds with
the work of doctor Sigmund Freud. Before we talk about
more modern approaches to addressing not just lowly to the text,
but how we discussed the abuse and sexualization of children
and young women. I wanted to clearly contextualize the popular
psychology that Sally Horner and Dolores Hayes would have been

(24:34):
growing up around. Popular psychology that Nabokov attempts to demonstrate
was pretty easy for Humbert Humbert to twist to his advantage.
So it brings me no pleasure to inform you that
we're going to talk briefly here about Sigmund Freud, and
to be clear, for all the freud Heads in the chat,
this is kind of my introduction to him as well.

(24:56):
The controversies surrounding his research and publication, combine mind with
the impossible to overestimate influence it's had on our culture
is enough to fill thousands and thousands of pages hours
of broadcast, just way more time than we have here.
But it's necessary to address because, to remind you, Nabukov
had a marked dislike and outward antagonism of the work

(25:19):
of both Freud and sexologist Alfred Kinsey, and to be honest,
I wasn't completely sure what his reasons. We're going to
be going into the research process for this show, and
maybe you're well acquainted with the controversies already, but it's
definitely not a common discussion for Normans like myself, so
we're going to get into it because after learning more

(25:39):
about Freud's life and work, I am far more in
the Nabokov camp at this point. Freud's conclusions are, for
my money, mostly a broad oversimplification of a series of
complicated problems that warrant close and specific examination without bias,
And for Nabukof it would appear that his first station

(26:00):
with Freud was also connected to Freud's methods of researching
child sexuality, which I only became familiar with recently. This
section was originally much longer and touched on Freud's myriad
issues on queerness, the absence of race or religion or
class from his work, his complicated but close relationship with

(26:21):
his unapologetically gay daughter, his propensity for cocaine. But it
just it got unwieldy. My producers were like, you have
you have to stop. But if you're interested in these topics,
I will leave some places to get started in the
show notes. This is obviously a very dense area of study,
and a lot of it was new to me. So

(26:41):
for brevity, we're going to stay focused on Freud as
it pertains to child sexual development and his views on
sex and women in particular. Nabokov seems to take issue
with Freud's child sexual development rhetoric, which has an interesting history,
as Freud continued to flip flop on his views on
serve vivers of child sexual abuse as his career went on.

(27:03):
So in culture today, Freud's work regarding child psycho sexual
development is everywhere, and there's a lot of his popular
theories that have kind of embedded themselves into our world.
As fact, the formative personality concept of the id, the ego,
and the super ego, life and death instincts mechanisms of defense.

(27:25):
So one of Freud's greatest hits is the psycho sexual
stages of development. This might sound familiar. Freud's separated five
stages of development here by age and quote unquote oerrogenous
zone or the body part that people of this age
tend to fixate on. These consist of the oral stage

(27:46):
from birth to a year. The oroginous zone here is
the mouth, the anal stage of ages one to three.
The oroginous zone is the bowels and the bladder phallic
stage ages three to six. Era in a zone are
the genitals latent stage ages six to puberty no orogenous

(28:06):
zone blubeto is inactive, and the genital stage puberty into adulthood.
There's also Freud's theories surrounding sexuality and childhood, which brought
us familiar hits like penis envy and castration anxiety, which
is a fancy way of saying oedipus complex, which is

(28:28):
a fancy way of saying, quote the fear of loss
or of damage to the genital organ as punishment for
incestuous wishes towards the mother, and murderous fantasies toward the
rival father unquote, normal stuff. Freud grounds a lot of

(28:48):
these theories in mythology, which is interesting because mythology is
famously completely made up. It reminds me of when my
uncle told me his favorite comedian was Deadpool. It's like,
first of all, that's not possible, Deadpool is not a
real man, and second of all, that's hurtful because I
am a comedian. Although if you asked Freud why I

(29:10):
was frustrated by my uncle saying this, he'd probably just
say I subconsciously wanted to steal his painess. Sorry. There's
also the concept of the Freudian slip, where, for example,
you would say a perfect ass instead of a perfect
assessment when you're talking to your crush in sociology in college,
pulling that example out of thin air. And then there

(29:30):
is seduction theory, and in all seriousness, my uncle's favorite
comedian Deadpool aside. Freud's seduction theory needs a lot of
unpacking as well. But to understand how this theory develops,
you've got to know a little more about Freud's career
and his use of his own experience and views to
shape the ideas of early psychoanalysis. So Freud is the

(29:51):
father of psycho analysis. Most will tell you again, I'm
sure there's a million counterpoints to this, but we're one
on wanting it here. He was born in eighteenth de
sexts to a poor Jewish family in Austria, and went
on to become at first a neurologist and then in
his thirties began to experiment with what would become psychoanalysis.
And it's around this time, in the eighteen nineties that

(30:12):
Freud releases details of the case that will serve as
the foundation for his legacy. This regards a case with
a subject called Anna Oh, who he claimed to have
cured of quote hysteria unquote, a fun Victorian diagnosis for
women feeling emotions and then expressing it. He first hypnotizes
her and then encourages her to talk about her symptoms,

(30:34):
then eventually stops hypnotizing her and just has her talk
to him in confidence and analyzes the content of her dreams.
Hysteria cured. But as messy as a lot of these
practices is, this is the basis for talk therapy. As
we know it today. There is a generalization that Freud
begins to develop around this time, and that's assuming that

(30:57):
all adult hysteria is automatic connected to childhood sexual trauma.
This is an assumption that is potentially harmful to project
onto a patient that hasn't experienced this and serves to
further harm and muddy and take away from the recovery
of patients who are seeking treatment because they have experienced it.
But the anna O case kicks off Sigmund Freud's career

(31:19):
and Freud starts to tell on himself in regards to
his lack of insight into women in his own work.
Pretty early on later in his career, he says, this,
the great question that has never been answered, and which
I have not yet been able to answer despite my

(31:40):
third years of research into the feminine soul, is what
does a woman who? I mean? Anyways, after the success
of the anna O case, Freud continued to treat others
and also turned his tactics in on him self. He

(32:00):
began self analyzing, and around this time he also started
to form his ideas around childhood sexual trauma, which changed
throughout his career, which brings us to seduction theory. Seduction theory,
put briefly, is what Freud thought the origin of hysteria was,
which he believed was repressed memories or unconscious memories of

(32:24):
child sexual abuse. This was first presented in public on
April one, eighteen ninety six, when Freud presented a paper
to his colleagues at the Society for Psychiatry and Neurology
in Vienna, and it's called the Atology of Hysteria. The
paper is built on Freud's experience with eighteen subjects of

(32:44):
all genders, all of whom he had concluded had trauma
due to the fact that they've been victims of sexual
assault by parents or trusted adults in their lives. That
is to say, he had traced a number of psychological
issues back to childhood. This paper doesn't blow up necessarily,
and in fact, there's some evidence that his colleagues at

(33:05):
the time did not approve of how he had arrived
at these conclusions, but Freud continues on a similar course
of study moving forward. Another major league controversial issue at
hand here is how did Freud safely and ethically conduct
this research on child sexual development and how was it verified.
Freud's explanations on how he arrived at these conclusions about

(33:27):
children is asking you to take his word for it.
He never that I was able to find, presents specific
evidence regarding this study, only what he had taken away
from having interacted with these patients. His reason for doing this,
according to J. M. Masson's paper The Assault on Truth,
Freud's suppression of the seduction theory was because he thought

(33:51):
his community couldn't handle the severity of the clinical case
stories about sexual abuse that he described. Per Freud, he
didn't want to describe the in detail before the seduction
theory had been more widely accepted, which what I understand
that attitude as it pertains to the general public. But
it does strike me and struck many in Freud's community

(34:13):
as extremely dodgy to not provide proof to some extremely
heavy theories on the basis that he assumed they couldn't
handle it. He promised at least two other times to
present precise evidence, but never actually did so. Since so
much of his studies involved his own interpretation of dreams,
A lot of present day psychologists dispute whether this research

(34:34):
actually existed in documentation, since Freud never produced it and
it was very dependent on his opinion in the case
of a patient. He did report his experiences with a
patient he called Little Hans. Later, in nineteen o nine,
Freud attempted to relate a five year old boy's fear
of horses with his fear of his father, with next

(34:54):
to no evidence, which Freud admitted saying this m hands
whatever had to be told, many things that he could
not say himself. He had to be presented with thoughts
which she had so far show no signs of possessing.

(35:18):
So when Freud does provide evidence, it strongly suggests that
a lot of the conclusions are more of a hymn thing.
Here's what changes in his seduction theory down the line.
Just a year after seduction theory is first presented in
Freud back pedals on the theory significantly, and he admits
a few holes in the theory as well, that in
order for it to work in the way he described it,

(35:40):
nearly always would have needed to be the father as
perpetrator across the board, which Freud said triggered a realization
of the unexpected frequency of hysteria, whereas surely such widespread
perversions against children are not very probable. Furthermore, he says

(36:05):
in eighteen ninety seven that the unconscious mind that he
claims to have extracted these memories from were not always
able to distinguish fact from fiction, which would discredit the
majority of Freud's work up until this point. This abandonment
of seduction theory led to Freud's new and improved damaging
theory called infantile sexuality, the penis envy, and the castration anxiety, that,

(36:29):
while causing quite a bit of discussion in their day,
ultimately made it easier for adults drinking the Freud kool
aid to ignore when children reported very real sexual abuse
to them. It made it all the easier to dismiss
a real child's concern as some kind of repressed Freudian
desire rather than a crime that they were brave to
come to another person about. In the end, of all

(36:51):
the tools that authorities and adults already had to ignore
the serious concerns of a child, Freud only gave them
a new weapon. Will be speaking to her later in
the episode, but I think Dr Luccio Williams summed up
this switch very concisely in her essay reading Lolita To
Understand Child Abuse, She says this quote Nabulkov was intuitively right,

(37:13):
even in his antipathy for Siegmund Freud, who could have
advanced knowledge on the impact of child sexual abuse and
human development and did not. Freud came back from Paris
shocked with the maltreated children he saw, examined by child
abuse pioneer Ambrogiotardi, a French pathologist and expert in forensic medicine.

(37:34):
In his Assault on Truth, Jeffrey M. Masson describes how
Freud was forced by Viennese society to abandon his proposed
seduction theory, in which hysteria occurred as a result of
premature sexual experiences, as no one could believe that so
many respectable gentlemen could indeed sexually abuse their own daughters.

(37:56):
As a result, Freud abandoned his theory and started defending
that patient report was a mere fabrication based on underlying
repressed sexual urges unquote. And in spite of the fact
that his opinions did change over time, for it remained
pretty resistant to criticism from guess It's women. Psychoanalyst Karen

(38:17):
Horney came for the concept of penis envy, countering it
with the idea that perhaps men have womb envy for
being unable to bear children. Freud replies with this, we
shall not be very greatly surprised if a woman analyst
who has not been sufficiently convinced of the intensity of

(38:39):
own wish for a penis also fails to attach proper
importance to that factor and her patience. I hope it
will not surprise you to hear there is a lot
of criticism and pushback on Freud's work in the area
of child psychology and as it pertains to women, whether
he liked it or not. One of the more comprehensive

(39:03):
arguments was made by social worker Florence Rush in the
nineteen seventies, long after Freud had died, called the Freudian
cover up, so as it pertains to Dolores Hayes. Once
you have the context of Freud's history of not sharing
research approaches, potentially forcing and projecting false memories on patients,
as well as the whole hysteria and rigid gender and

(39:26):
patriarchal anxiety narratives he was so passionate about, it's hard
to take this work for gospel. A quick word on
Kinsey's research on child sexuality here as well. While he's
remembered now as a then controversial now somewhat accepted sexologist
who was played by Liam Neeson an a socio movie
in the early two thousands. There are some things worth

(39:46):
mentioning about Alfred Kinsey as well. We see a lot
of flat out unethical tactics in publishing information about child abuse.
Another content warning here, and I am pulling from a
two thousand for New York Times piece by Kyle Crane
examining Kinsey's legacy. Around the time of the biopic release
Sexual Behavior of the Human Male, Kinsey claims to have

(40:10):
spoken with nine adult male child sex abusers about their experiences.
Is intent as it was framed then and is now,
is presenting this as strictly scientific data. Over forty years later,
following Kinsey's death, an independent researcher named Judith Riceman revisited
Kinsey's original work and found that all the experiences included

(40:31):
in his publication came from one person, not nine, which
proves very little about the nature of child sex abusers
Beyond this one specific person, who Kinsey had actively encouraged
in correspondence to continue sending account and has been interpreted
by Reisman and other critics as greatly exploitative and as

(40:52):
false data. And so at this point in my research,
my brain is just leaking out of my ears, because
how could these studies conducted in these unethical ways by
professionals like Freud and Kinsey, with these massive holes in
their approaches and failing to verify really much of anything
of what they're claiming is true, continue to shape the

(41:12):
way children are taught to view their own sexuality. And
that's the rhetorical question. We know that this happens. Why
did Lolita become a story about a child inviting their
own abuse according to the society presenting it? Because that
is what our culture does. And this is Nabokov's problem
with Freud, honing in particularly on his and Kinsey's research

(41:34):
practices as reason enough to discredit their entire body of work.
He criticizes them in part through the overblown narrative style
of Lolita's fictional prologue by John Ray Jr. Saying this
of him later, after doing my impersonation of suave John Ray,
the character and Lolita who pins the forward, any comments
coming straight from me may strike one, may strike me

(41:56):
in fact, as an impersonation of Vladimir Nabokov talking about
his own book. A few points, however, have to be discussed,
and the autobiographic device may induce mimic and model to blend.
Teachers of literature are apt to think up such problems
as what is the author's purpose? Or still worse, what
is the guy trying to say? Okay, he's attacking me,

(42:18):
but he does go on to say this, I am
neither a reader nor writer of didactic fiction. And despite
John Ray's assertion, Lolita has no moral in tow and Humbert,
Humbert in the book takes place in is well aware
of the theories of the day and spewed them out
to professionals to give a false positive, playing it to

(42:40):
his advantage and wasting the mental health professionals time. Note
passages like this in the book, I discovered there was
an endless source of robust enjoyment and 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 and never allowing them the slightest glimpse of

(43:03):
one's real sexual predicament, and while taking advantage of the
leeway that Freud's work inherently provides him. He also comes
to the table with a dismissal of psychology of the
day that's not dissimilar to Nabokov. Again, Humbert is never
to be trusted here, and I don't even agree with
this blanket statement on mental health. But in regards to

(43:25):
the specific type of prescriptive pop psychology of this era,
Freud and Kinsey were absolutely Nabokov's targets. You can also
reference this moment where Humbert talks about his stays at
sanatoriums prior to meeting Dolora's Hayes the child therapist in
me a fake as most of them are, but no
matter regurgitated neo Freudian hash and conjured up a dreaming

(43:48):
and exaggerated Dolly in the latency period of Girlhood and
there are a lot of references and jokes made at
Freud's expense and the adaptations as well. He's referenced at
least once in every adaptation, and the Peter Seller's Quilty
does a full on Freud impression in the nineteen sixty
two kubric adaptation. Here's Nabokov in on a book entitled Lolita,

(44:12):
although everybody should know that I detest symbols and allegories,
which is due partly to my old feud with Freudian
voodooism and partly to my loathing of generalizations devised by
literary mythists and sociologists. An otherwise intelligent reader who flipped
through the first part described Lolita as old Europe debauching
Young America, while another flipper saw in it Young America

(44:33):
debauching old Europe. I first read Nabokov's skepticism towards psychology
of his day to be potentially harmful, because, after all,
as it exists at present, that may have been able
to help Dolora's hayes and survivors like her. But in
the context of pop psychology of his day, this aversion
makes a lot more sense to me, because, after all,

(44:56):
Dr Freud's opinions about women, children, and sexual y would
have posed a fairly large threat to Dolores. On top
of the fact that she very well may not have
been believed. It's just as possible her reality could have
been dismissed as a Freudian fantasy and a lust for
something that in reality she was subjected to because he

(45:17):
specialized in finding ways to connect real trauma to a
patriarchal structure that he was personally fixated on and finding
ways to make it the victim's fault. And as prominent
as the criticism around Freud was at different points, the
assumptions made by his work remain very potent in popular entertainment,

(45:38):
to the point that there's cinematic tropes that are built
around his work. So it's unfortunately safe to say that
the dated psychoanalysis techniques likely would have worked against Dolores
Hayes and Sally Horner's best interests. So where has the
study of sexual abuse of children landed today? To begin
answering that, I'd like to share a little bit of

(45:59):
an interview you I did with Lucia Williams, whose work
in treating survivors of abuse has been greatly influential in
the last few decades. She is a specialist in working
with victims like Dolores, who argues that Lolita, the book,
not the Adaptations, is a very useful text to exist
both as a work of art and as a fairly
comprehensive insight into how victims of sexual abuse as children

(46:23):
can repress and react to trauma in real time. She
is a former professor of psychology at the Universidade Federal
days Al Carlos in Brazil, where she coordinated la PREV,
the Laboratory of Violence Analysis and Prevention. Her paper titled
Reading Lolita to Understand Child Sexual Abuse argues that Lolita

(46:44):
is an effectively written story that illustrates both a convincing
child sexual abusers tactics towards entrapping a child victim and
a convincing victim of his abuse in the behavior we
see Dolores Hayes display as she struggles to escape humbered control.
I talked to Lucia about the common myths around abuse
that in a book of tackles or attempts to tackle,

(47:06):
and her experience in the field. Here's our interview. I
once got a Cambridge fellowship and I could do whatever
I wanted, as I'm just gonna work on Lolita. So
and then I used that analysis that I did to
teach psych students an intro on psych abuse, psychological abuse

(47:30):
and and and sech foo abuse because when I asked
my students who read Lolita, maybe one person out of
the whole class would have read it, which is for me,
a tradition what a classic is right, everybody has heard
about it, but nobody, hardly anybody has read it. But
when when people read it, sometimes they didn't make the

(47:54):
connection that that was such an important book. From your standpoint, Um,
what does he get right about? Um? I guess we'll
start with what does he get right about the character
of Dolores. Dolores? First of all, her name right, her
name means pain in Spanish, So he for anybody who

(48:16):
thinks that he's defending, he is making an apology. He
starts with a very painful name, which is, you know,
an important metaphor. But what he gets it right? She
is a twelve year old kid. And Hollywood and other
you know media, they you know, there's this I don't

(48:39):
know how to describe it, but there is this movement
that Lolita was a very forward teenager and very uh
mature sexually, you know, and very a cidectress type type
of person. And she was just a kid. She was
a twelve year old kid. It's so complex, x, isn't it?

(49:01):
Because you know, when you little kids, when they're growing
up in general, they think that sex is gross, you know,
and that's they're not ready. They are not mature enough
to understand and to enjoy it. Of course, they're very
curious and we're sexualized being from the minute we're born.
But it takes it goes slowly, you know, it takes

(49:24):
a while, and that's why it's so wrong, because it's
a break, it's a transruption in power. An adult is
a mature, sexually mature person and this little kid is
not ready for all this massive information that's coming along,
and it comes along with guilt, depression, with fear. He

(49:48):
does a very good job describing a possible man with pedophilia,
which is a very very serious type of mental illness.
But anyways, for example, he disconstructs the myth that it's
always a disgusting person. You know, somebody you would see

(50:09):
in a dark alley and you would be scared. Most
of these guys are you know, they could be anybody.
So Humber is somebody who is very smart. Well be
it's light to people in general. He's very um eloquent,
he's fun to talk to. His humors, right, So that's

(50:31):
an important point because you know, he breaks the stereotype,
you know, don't look for somebody is not going to
be necessarily somebody that you're going to be afraid with.
And then why why do you going off that? Why
is it so often confused as a love story? Because

(50:52):
I think that people don't understand about child sexual abuse enough.
For example, they think that it's rare, they think that
it's hardly ever happens, and it's very very very common.
Right of course, there's different degrees. You know, it could
be something very mild, it could be something that was

(51:15):
very intense and lasted for years like in her case.
So and that they don't understand the complexity the dynamics,
how hard it is for the child to speak, you know,
how hard it is for the judicial system to deal
with a crime like that. That you have the witness
who is a little child and uh, and you have

(51:39):
an adult who is very powerful. I closed out our
talk by speaking with Luccia briefly on what she feels
needs to be done to prevent abuse of this nature.
And her answer was both simple and complicated. Talk about it,
she says this, there's so much to be done. I mean,
you know, um, working for example, with professionals, if that's

(52:04):
a great way to do prevation, working with judges, working
with lawyers, so you need to to to work, you know,
and then with society in general. And also we have
to dismistified and tell parents that, you know, they've got
to talk about to about that with their kids. And
it's it's difficult because parents are scared. Thank you so

(52:28):
much to Lucia Williams for her time and insights. And
these views are echoed by another writer, Socna Fall in
her paper from Humbert and Lolita the other as prey.
And for the record, this paper was written in French
and I used Google translates, so if there's any clinky wording,
blame me and Google. Too many readers or rather non readers,

(52:50):
continue to make come there the prey of Lolita exactly
like too many parents and police professionals, magistrate shrinks the less.
Even social workers want to believe that it is the
complainant with her t shirt and her tanned forms who
make the adult her prey. Like the fallacious pleadings of
the sexual assailants, humber self centered discourse succeeds in establishing

(53:14):
itself as the discourse of reality. Alita is no longer
listening to for what she says quote disgusting things, nor
understood for what she experiences, and a quote and those
sobs at night, every night, as soon as I pretend
to be asleep. Nor is she seen for what she is,

(53:36):
a teenage girl deprived of love, but once again as
an object prey of speech, this time and never as
a subject. Luccia Williams references falls work and her own essay,
and a lot of what Luccia and I talked about
is connected to what Nabakov gets right in his text.
But she's just as adamant about acknowledging the common misreadings

(53:59):
of the book and the potential harm that that can wield.
Here's what she had to say about it. One of
the issues that perhaps people get confused, and I've seen
very young modern writers talking about this, saying, oh, she's
the one who seduced and she wasn't even a virgin.

(54:21):
And it's true. One of the reasons that Lolita the
book remains such a controversial text is because of how
it's been weaponized by those doing bad faith readings of
it and perpetuating those bad reads in order to harm others,
particularly young girls and women. As this horrible cycle tends
to go. I got an email from a listener whose

(54:42):
identity will of course be protected here, and what they
describe about their experience with the text of Lolita is
unfortunately not uncommon. It involves a teacher who claims to
be teaching the book of text, who not only frames
it as a love story, but leverages this misinterpre rotation
to groom a young or underage student, done by an

(55:03):
instructor whose career in life were unaffected by doing this
deeply scarred the listener who contacted me, and understandably, even
a mention of the text is a huge trigger for them.
And of course it is a lot of feedback I've
gotten in regards to stories like this is that if
Nabokov's work can be so easily twisted to harm the

(55:24):
young girls and women that it appears he was trying
to draw attention to, is it worth examining. Still there's
no one answer to this. The conversation is still going. Again,
A lot of readers avoid Lolita altogether due to their
own experiences with sexual abuse. That is extremely valid. You
don't need me to tell you that, but I will

(55:46):
reinforce it, and I'm in no way condoning giving this
book to children. I don't think Lolita by Nabokov should be.
But in a world where children don't always have these conversations,
and not doing so has demonstrable harm, Lolita has assumed
a role for better and for worse. I'm going to
be sharing two interviews with you now. Both unfortunately involve

(56:09):
the concept of grooming, so I wanted to define what
that is. Clearly trigger warning being placed here again for
abuse with grooming in particular. According to the National Society
for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, grooming is defined
as such, quote Grooming is when someone builds a relationship, trust,
an emotional connection with a child or young person so

(56:32):
they can manipulate, exploit, and abuse them unquote. They expand
on this definition, saying, quote, children and young people can
be groomed online or in the real world by a
stranger or by someone they know. This can mean a
family member, an adult in a child's community, or a teacher.
And it's not extremely surprising that bad faith actors who

(56:54):
are intentionally reading Humbert's account to validate their own abuse
of children have often used Lolita to intentionally victimized children. First,
an account that involves grooming where Lolita was framed so
disingenuously that the subject of that abuse didn't want to
engage with the book at all for some time. I mean,
who would. My first talk is with the writer of

(57:17):
one of the most insightful, personal and difficult reads that
tackles this topic. Her name is Alison Wood, and her
memoir being Lolita, came out in It's an account that
reflects this listener's email and the accounts of others. A
high school teacher used the romanticized Humbert in a way
that is unchallenging of how deceitful and criminal he is

(57:39):
in order to groom her into a relationship among other
predatory writers like Lewis Carroll. Alison woods memoir tracks this
relationship and how Lolita factored into it, and she was
kind enough to take the time to speak with me
about her memoir and what this means for Lolita. Here's
some of our interview. I was introduced to Lolita when

(58:00):
I was seventeen years old. I was a senior in
high school and an English teacher in my high school
who was supposed to be mentoring me and giving me
extra support in my writing. My creative writing teacher thought
that I was talented. Um, So she asked another teacher

(58:20):
to meet with me after school and just sort of
give you some extra attention. So he gave me a
copy of Lolita. He told me it was a beautiful
story about love. And by then our after school mentoring
had already begun escalating into something far more nefarious and

(58:47):
complicated and uh not appropriate. By the time he gave
me a Littlita, we were already meeting secretly at night
in a diner in an in the next town over,
and the book Lolita was part of that. He told
me that it was a story about our love, this

(59:09):
sort of star crossed lovers, younger girl, older man, that
it was just the height of romance. And I was
seventeen and didn't know any better. So I believed my
teacher wasn't the only one who argues that Lolita is
a story about love. I mean one of the original

(59:30):
one of the original reviews of the book from Vanity
Fair called it the only convincing love story of our century,
like what, I'm sorry, Lolita. My understanding of Lolita began
to shift as I got older, and basically, as I

(59:51):
began to learn about things outside of the teacher's purview.
And when I went to college and him, that was
when I began to understand the Lita on my own terms.
So I went to class expecting that I knew exactly
how this conversation, how this lecture would go. And then

(01:00:11):
my teacher I started talking about the book by writing
on the chalkboard Who's seducing who, and talked about Lolita
as this book about obsession and rape and kidnapping and murder.
And she gave this example as a way to talk

(01:00:35):
about Lolita and her Sorry, she always called her Dolores Hayes.
Her actual name is Dolora's Hayes. Her name is not Lolita.
That's how Humbert views her, and that's how Humbert shapes
her in the book. But her actual name is Dolores.
And my professor made a point to always call her
Dolores because basically, as a culture, we have taken on

(01:01:00):
Umbert's point of view of tourist by calling by thinking
of her as Lolita and then Lolita in this iconography
way of it's a doctress, the Jezebel, the dangerous young girl,
and none of that is true. None of that is true.
She was a victim, and she was a teenage girl.

(01:01:22):
I feel like in the literary world there's this really
like strong divide between Lolita is bad, Lolita is good,
like and never the Twain shall meet, you know, um
and their Nabokov has a lot lot of defenders. Um.
People make excuses, People talk about how he's a genius.

(01:01:46):
Their entire graduate level seminars dedicated to him. I mean,
in particular, straight white guys I think are very into Nabokov,
which is fine. I take a more complicated look. I
think at Lolita, and this is not just from a
personal standpoint. I think the books too long. So when

(01:02:07):
I teach Lolita, and this is how to say, I
do not think that Lolita should not be read or taught.
I absolutely believe that even bad books, and I'm using
bad isn't like not badly written, but you know, like complicated,
problematic books should still be read. But they need to
be read with a context, right. They cannot just read

(01:02:30):
these books in this vacuum of genius like no, no,
we we we don't do that anymore. We don't do
that anymore. There. I I reject the uh, the overwhelming
nature of the white western male cannon. I think that's
a bunch of bullshit, and I think all work should

(01:02:54):
be criticized, and I think that's fair, and I think
it's long past time for us to be discussions about
books like these where women are objectified and sexualized. And
Lolita is not really a person in this book. She
is Dolores is not a person. There's only Lolita. But
so we read Lolita at the end of my course,

(01:03:17):
and in my course, whenever I teach creative writing, we
almost exclusively read women and non binary folks and women
of color and queer women. And that's that's the cannon
that I create for us. So by the time we
read Lolita, which is the last thing that we read,
my students have all have a really strong understanding of

(01:03:41):
how a perspective a book like this is different. Right
because with like, if I was teaching Lolita, Lolita was
one of the first things that I taught, I have
no idea. I mean I have uh, I have uh.
I'm certain if Lolita was the first book that I taught,

(01:04:02):
I'm certain that there would be a lot of defenders
and a lot of my students would not fully understand
what is happening on the page, and how the prose
is manipulating the reader. I would not be confident that
my students would have the ability to critique, to see
through the language, to understand, but by the end of
my course they do. Like That's what the three months

(01:04:26):
have been about. How do you meet a piece of
art and have the tools to ask questions about it
and to engage with it. Lolita is a cultural myth.
Lolita is a touchstone. Lolita means things, and sure, okay,

(01:04:47):
I think I think the book does deserve to be,
you know, understood and treated with respect as a piece
of art. But to think that these other things don't matter, like,
what kind of privilege is that? Because also, I mean,
let's be real, like the white the white man is

(01:05:09):
the hero of Lolita. Thank you again to Alison Wood
and definitely check out her memoir Being Lolita for more.
I love her approach to teaching Lolita. It's a challenging
and modern approach that doesn't just address Humbard's narrative unreliability
very concisely, but centers Dolores and has a lot to

(01:05:30):
teach us about how biased narratives are written and developing
reading skills that are very conscious of This bind bons

(01:05:50):
Enough as another writer who was introduced to Lolita through grooming,
but had a different experience in using Dolores as a
guide to navigate through trauma. She wrote beautifully about this
time in her life, which was originally during high school,
in a New York Times Modern Love column. Back into
thousand eighteen, she was given a copy of Lolita by
her uncle, a close family friend not biological, who encouraged

(01:06:15):
her to not tell her parents that he had done so.
She writes this, I wanted to read Lolita because I
believed it would mitigate my sexual shame. The similarity between
the novels plot and my day to day life had
sent me on a Google search, where I read excerpts
and watched trailers of both film adaptations categorized under crime, drama,
and romance. Until then, it had never occurred to me

(01:06:36):
to consider my relationship with my uncle under any of
those genres that anyone could think of. A romance nauseated me,
while crime and drama seemed overblown. The behavior of Bonsanot's
uncle often reflects Humbert's exactly becoming a confidant and alternative
to her conservative parents buying her presence, conditioning her to
believe that keeping a secret should be empowering to her,

(01:06:59):
not limiting or scary. She continues under the false pretense
of his wife joining us. He turned our day trips
into overnights. On weekends, he drove us into Manhattan, delivering
me to acting classes and then picking me up for
dinners and Broadway plays. Understanding she was being abused, but
afraid she would ruin her uncle's life by saying so,

(01:07:20):
she turned back to the text of Lolita to take
cues from Dolores Hayes. I came to see how Lolita
uses Humbert's obsession with her as a means to gain
power over him. In the Blue Kidnapping Car, in which
the two travel cross country, she uses his power to
accuse him of rape, of being a dirty man, while
Humbert fumbles to justify booking one hotel room for both
of them. She names their situation for the incest it

(01:07:42):
is she knows she is Humbert's vulnerability and learns how
to use herself against him. Later, she says this, when
he surprised me with an apartment he had rented for
us near my school, I told him for the first
time that I hated him, that he was as much
a pervert as a man in the book, and once
the accusations began, I could not stop. Although he had
helped to finance my school fees, I also demanded envelopes

(01:08:03):
of money, determined to be ungrateful to exact collateral over dinners.
I told him about men I had been with and
what we had done, at which point he would set
aside his plate and moan that he had lost his appetite.
Bonsonath told a teacher about the abuse before graduating high school,
and then the police. Through Dolores's actions, she was able
to take steps Dolores did towards her liberation from an

(01:08:24):
abuser and got out. Today, she's a professional writer with
a master's degree, whose modern love piece is being republished
in Lolita in the Afterlife. She is awesome, and I
got to catch up with her a couple of weeks ago.
I think you're all. I was always kind of searching
for her in the text. She's so much occluded by

(01:08:45):
everything that Humbert Humbert is saying. I mean, she really
really is his narrative, and you know, even the moments
that you feel or I feel um that she peeks
through um unfiltered you know, moments of dialogue or this
is like nerdy but chapter thirty two, or he's kind
of thinking about you know, things details about her that

(01:09:05):
he's omitted that kind of things that make him feel
guilty or um, really highlight her how he doesn't really
know who she is as an individual, or her thought process,
or the fact that she is feeling like deep pain
over everything waiting through all of his language about her.

(01:09:26):
I just thought that she was you know, bold and
brave and um, you know, she kind of challenged him
in a kind of snarky way, and and I don't
know her fate is like very sad in the story,
but she's so opaque in ways that I think, Um,
when when she does come through, I really like latched
onto it. And um, I know I wrote about us

(01:09:48):
in the piece, but you know, even moments where you
know he's gaslighting her or you know, doing classic grooming tactics.
So she kind of sees through all like you know,
booking one bedroom for the two of them, and and
and also knowing that you know, whatever happened with her mother.
You know feel it's like he had a dirty hand
in it as well, like she can see all of that.
And I think that comes through between the second time

(01:10:09):
when you were returning to it, Um, was there anything
that kind of struck you very differently or what was
what was it like returning to that text? I think
what was different is even the frame, um, the framework
of how I arrived at it. I think when I
was UM, when I first read it. And it was

(01:10:29):
funny because even in this college class, we all kind
of talked about everyone had read this book before as
a teenager or an adolescent and had like a very
weird whatever brought them to it was weird, and I
think has to do a lot with the ways that
this is twisted and popular culture. I kind of bought
the like quotes around it, you know what's that really

(01:10:52):
popular one the greatest love story or whatever, um, and
this and that. So I think by the time I
was coming to it again, UM, I was well much
it was a totally different framework. It was about like
reading books about about rape and UM, so I kind
of was, you know, not drawn in by that. Um,

(01:11:16):
you don't know, like the the love weird love aspect
of it. I think it would be useful too before
reading it, kind of read the conversation around it and
how that conversation has been distorted and um, you know
really you know, kind of growth at times, and and
over sexualizing this trope of a precocious girl. I feel like,

(01:11:37):
you know, reading all of that, I would if I
was teaching it, I would do that first. Um, and
then because I think it kind of makes it even
more appalling then like when you read about how it's
been um celebrated and really weird ways and unsettling ways,
and then too, then go into the text knowing knowing

(01:12:00):
how it's been distorted. Then you're like looking at it
and you're seeing it for what it truly is. Oh,
maybe you just wanted to add something that I was
thinking about since you brought it up earlier. But talking
about how a lot of women have the experience of
reading this twice reading it once as a as a
young person who identifies with this character in an immediate sense.

(01:12:21):
You know, either they're still going through the abuse or
they're just like her age versus reading it when you're
a little bit older. And I think one of the
weird things, I mean, one of the things, I mean,
the process of grooming does this to you, like it
adultifies you? And it's interesting how when you read it.
When I read it as um as a teenager, Um,

(01:12:44):
I just thought of myself as so adult, and in
that weird way, I kind of thought of her as
older as well, because that's I just didn't really see
myself as a child, and the book is also asking
you not to see her as a child. And then
when you're older, Um, it's it's so I think that's
like a really weird thing to confront that you had

(01:13:06):
once seen it that way and you kind of have to,
you know, have sympathy for yourself at a younger age
as well, and you know, look at yourself as a girl,
and I think that you're looking at her as a
girl because that's what she is. Bonzanata has an essay
included in the upcoming anthology Lolita in the Afterlife on beauty,
risk and Reckoning with the most indelible and shocking novel

(01:13:28):
of the twentieth century, which comes out in Thank You
So Much, Bin Do. The final example I'm going to
pull from here is when we talked about in episode
one of Lolita podcast, Azar Nafeces reading Lolita in Tehran.
As a reminder, this is a memoir of a professor
who began a secret reading group with a group of

(01:13:48):
female Iranian students in the ninety nineties. Nafisi and her
group analyzed Western literature through the lens of students who
haven't known anything but the oppressive gender roles of revolutionary Iran,
and the women in the group empathize with Dolores considerably,
talking through the manipulative tactics that Humbert Humbert takes both
with Nafisi and with each other, and are troubled and

(01:14:11):
touched by Dolores's inability to live as a quote unquote
normal girl. Nafisi has this to say, Lolito belongs to
a category of victims who have no defense and are
never given a chance to articulate their own story. As such,
she becomes a double victim. Not only her life but
also her life story is taken from her. We told

(01:14:35):
ourselves that we were in that class to prevent ourselves
from falling victim to this second crime. The women and
the reading group had what first time readers like Alison
would and Bindu Bonsanath did not each other, and being
slightly older and a framing of the work that did
not have a vested interest in selling Humbert Humbert as

(01:14:56):
a romantic hero. There are a lot of fascinating parts
of naphi He's memoir, but what really shines through about
Lolita is the difference it makes when a young reader
is encouraged to empathize with the lories from the book's
first page, to prioritize finding her in the novel instead
of taking her abuser's word at phase value. In my

(01:15:16):
talking to psychology professionals for this show, one thing that
really shines through, in particular is the need for our
culture to find a way to have a meaningful discussion
on the subject of child abuse and to educate both
children and adults on communicating with each other and being
vigilant to children around them who may be at risk
for abuse. I am not claiming that this field is perfect,

(01:15:39):
but it has come a long way. So to close
this episode, I want to share some of my interview
with Dr Mike gold Lamb. He's a pioneer in the
field of child psychology and was the head of the
Section on Social and Emotional Development of the National Institute
of Child Health and Human Development in Washington, d C.
For seventeen years. He was also an expert witness when

(01:16:00):
Prop eight challenged same sex marriage in California and effectively
argued that a child did not need heterosexual parents in
order to grow up happy and well cared for. He
also developed the n I C h D Protocol, which
is grounded in research on the cognitive and communicative elements
of children's development, as well as developing techniques that allow

(01:16:21):
children to provide accurate information about their experiences, very often
about sexual abuse. Here's some of our interview. Well, the
major problems which came to before in a spate of
multi victim cases in the nine eighties work cases where

(01:16:44):
very young children were believed to have been abused UH
and were intensively and repeatedly and it turns out highly
suggestively interview by those investigating it, and that the justifications
for doing that were varied, but but for many they

(01:17:07):
included the idea that that that little children really couldn't
adequately describe their experiences, or they were predicated on assumptions
that many children were too afraid to talk or were
trying to protect themselves and others by not talking, And

(01:17:30):
again that the solution was to make suggestive comments to
them and encourage them to verify or acquiesced to those
kinds of art allegations. In these cases, guilty verdicts were delivered,

(01:17:52):
and then those verdicts were overthrown on appeal as it
became clear that that really we weren't listening to the
child's words, we were simply listening to the words of these,
in most cases, well meaning but perhaps overzealous advocates. But

(01:18:13):
what we've tried to do is to first knock back
a lot of the assumptions about how incompetent children are,
because in fact, actually kids are quite capable of describing
their experiences from a relatively young age. We want to
turn that dynamic around. We want the adults role to

(01:18:34):
be primarily that of the person who is providing the
scaffolds or the context in which the child can actually
talk about his or her experiences. We need to get
them to understand that this is a situation where the
adult doesn't know what the right answer is, that they're
the expert. So it involves a little bit of just

(01:18:57):
changing changing the dynamics, understanding that from the perspective of
the child, this is a kind of unusual situation. What
I think was the prevailing notion, which was that sexual
abuse was a very rare phenomenon, that it didn't happen

(01:19:18):
very often, and when it did, it was mostly thought
of in terms of incest within family dynamics, and was
seen as as a really remarkable behavior that came from
highly pathological motivations and sources. And I think both sorts

(01:19:44):
of beliefs really hindered our recognition of what must have
been the reality that there was actually much more sexual
abuse taking place than anybody wanted to recognize. To some extent,
I think you know that that was part of the

(01:20:04):
problem with the reception of Lolita, because it describes a
situation where you have what would otherwise be very obvious
sexual abuse and in a and otherwise normal sort of context,
if I can use that words. Now, there's often this

(01:20:26):
reference to the seductive behavior of of Flita Um and
you know that lucis the whole point. It is sexual abuse.
You know what, whatever whatever way you try to cast
her behavior, she is not responsible for what happened. But

(01:20:51):
I think for for children, you know, prepubescent children, but
also you know, early adolescents, there's a big concern about
issues of our partly responsible did I do something, which

(01:21:11):
I have to say is also a you know, a
huge part of the issue when prosecuting rent cases, because
there is often the inference made was the suggestion that
the victim in some way bears some of the responsibility,

(01:21:32):
and in many cases of abuse, particularly when you have
sort of long term abuse by somebody who has taken
the time to gloom a victim, that may indeed be
part of the message that the gloomer is conveying. You know,

(01:21:52):
this is our special secret. We need to keep it.
It's secret um And I think that that's something that
that is played quite well in the book and is
very relevant to what I think we often see a

(01:22:12):
lot of what I what I'm tackling here has to
do with the book and how the book clearly outlines
this really horrible, detailed account that's narrated by an abuser,
and then the cultural takeaway, which I think is, you know,
tends to frame Lolita as the seductress. What do you

(01:22:33):
make of I guess that kind of cultural trend. Yeah,
I mean, I think that's the the ultimate irony, that
that again it's the victim blaming, and that it's the
the child in this piece who has been regardless of

(01:22:53):
whatever she did or felt morally and legally, she's a victim.
She's a victim of this older man, and and that's
where the responsibility should lie. And it it does bother

(01:23:14):
me a great deal that the perception would be one
that in a sense attributes responsibility some or all to
her for the fact that she was a victim. In
so many ways. Sexual abuses still with us. We're now

(01:23:35):
so much more aware of it. I think that the
popular views, though, are still quite distorted. There are lots
of myths, but one of the prevailing myths is the
notion that, you know, most sexual abuses performed by strangers,

(01:23:58):
you know. And so there's all of these paragrams that
encourage kids, you not to get into a call as strangers,
and not to go off with people and so on,
which are good, which are good advice, but they list
the point that most sexual abuse is performed by people

(01:24:21):
familiar to the child. Thank you so much to Michael.
Another area of prevention, of course, is prevention regarding offenders.
This podcast is focused on the reclaiming of Dolores Hayes,
not the analysis of Humbert Humbert. I think he's gotten
quite enough airtime over the years, but in speaking with

(01:24:42):
Lucia and Michael particularly, the need for preventative treatment is
necessary on the end of potential offenders as well. So
I'll place another trigger warning here for the discussion of
people who are attracted to miners as well as child
sexual abuse. This was an area was extremely triggering for
me as well, and I've been struggling on how to

(01:25:05):
address this responsibly within this show, so full disclosure. When
the first episode of Lolita podcast came out, I got
several emails from m a p s. That is short,
I learned for minor attracted people. The people who reached
out were non offending m a p s or law

(01:25:25):
abiding m a p s. As one put it. They
were careful to specify in these emails that acknowledging oneself
as a minor attractive person does not necessitate being an offender.
Not that that makes it any less uncomfortable or triggering.
I was honestly very taken aback and extremely anxious when
this happened. This is an area where I struggled to

(01:25:48):
even attempt empathy and gut instinct. I was tempted to
ignore the emails altogether. But after thinking on it for
a couple of days, what Lucia said in particular in
our conversation stuck with me, where she said essentially that
not confronting an issue because it makes you uncomfortable doesn't
do anything to help anybody. The sexual abuse of a

(01:26:11):
minor is a very common crime, and that means that
there are a lot of people out there who are
committing that crime, and yet the conversation about how these
crimes could have been prevented is still a very silent
and taboo discussion. I've learned in the past two weeks
that there is a distinction between the term pedophile another
way of saying m a P. And the term child

(01:26:34):
sexual abuser. I touched base with Lucia Dr Williams to
ask for some clarity on how to best approach making
this distinction in the show. She can explain far better
than I can on this topic, so I'm going to
quote her with permission from an email she sent me
this past week. She says, quote, It's important to stress

(01:26:56):
that pedophilia is a type of mental illness and not
a rhime. As usually, there is plenty of confusion the
crime is child sexual abuse. To complicate things, this crime
can also be committed by people who did not have pedophilia.
This could be due to a series of factors including
previous abuse history, sexual difficulties, loneliness, etcetera. In other words,

(01:27:21):
if you are not exclusively attracted by children, you don't
have pedophilia. A lot of fake news mentions pedophilia inappropriately.
We talked about pedophilia because that was Humbert Humbert's case,
but people without pedophilia may abuse children unquote. So I
am the conversation around Humbert. Humbert for years have been
using the word pedophile to equate it with criminality, and

(01:27:44):
I've used the word pedophile in the past as an
all encompassing qualifier for a person who has sexually abused
a minor. Given that Humbert is not a real person
anymore than I'm a real psychologist, I couldn't say exactly
where he falls here, except that doctor will Him seems
to believe that he is both a pedophile and a
child sex abuser, and Nabokov makes it clear that Humbert

(01:28:07):
should be receiving mental health treatment for this reason, but
is not willing to do so in good faith, and
I know that there may be people who are upset
with me for trying to speak about this. But when
m APS reached out to me, that presented a just
kind of a quandary that needed a lot of consideration
on my part, and so I took a little bit

(01:28:30):
of time and I talked to a number of people
whose opinions I trust, several of whom who have experienced
c s A, which is short for child sexual abuse themselves.
And this is the decision that I came to. And
in making that call, something that particularly moved me was
this anonymous account of someone I know who is a

(01:28:52):
cis a survivor who has very strong feelings on this topic,
and I'm going to be reading this for them quote.
As a survivor, I have an abundance of resources, books,
and support groups at my disposal, but the damage has
already been done. Making sense of the sexual abuse I

(01:29:13):
endured for the duration of my adolescence, beginning when I
was twelve years old, has been and continues to be
one of the greatest obstacles of my life. I was
twenty eight before I could even bring myself to say
the words to a therapist. The particular challenge I face
is the man who abused me as a family member,
who remains very much in my life, which unfortunately is

(01:29:36):
far from unique. According to RAIN the Rape Abuse in
Incest National Network, over ninety three percent of c s
A perpetrators are known to their victim. The culture of
silence and shame around childhood sexual abuse both belies its
pervasiveness and perpetuates it. More recently, the rise of the

(01:29:57):
conspiracy theory group Q and on signifies to me that
it is easier for some people to stomach the fictitious
notion that cis A perpetrators are confined to a powerful,
evil superstructure far away from them, rather than father's, uncle's, brothers, cousins,
and sometimes mothers, people they pass in the aisles of

(01:30:18):
the grocery store every day, which is overwhelmingly the reality.
Much has been said about stopping the cycle of childhood
sexual abuse, but that phrase is usually targeted towards adjusting
the behavior of a survivor rather than a potential abuser.
The clearest articulation of my feeling on this matter comes

(01:30:39):
from writer, activist and fellow cis A survivor, Tashmika Tarrok
in her essay casting Aspersions, where she writes, quote, it
is time to consider where interventions might take place for
those who might harm children. Teens who did not have
an understanding of bodily autonomy and consent will not respect

(01:30:59):
the bodies of others. There is not national movement to
make services available for people who have caused harm or
who were contemplating sexual violence towards children. There are not
enough publicly accessible accountability support groups or cognitive behavioral therapy
groups in service of changing the behavior of perpetrators of

(01:31:20):
sexual violence. Why do we always lay the burden of
ending sexual violence at the feet of those who have
survived it? And that ends touchmaker tax quote continuing the
anonymous survivor. The ubiquity of childhood sexual abuse and its
lifelong implications for victims demands that we dismantle the reticence

(01:31:42):
and denial that surrounds addressing abusers and would be perpetrators
outside of the cars ROLL system, that we make a
concerted effort to pull the problem from its root. We
owe survivors that much unquote, and I want to thank
them so much again and for sharing that with me,
um and with you for this show. The m a

(01:32:06):
p s who contacted me directed me to some of
the few anonymous resources available to m a p s
who either feel they are at risk for offending or
are seeking a therapist that they can speak with openly
and In preparing for this episode and for this segment,
I spoke with a few of the nonprofits whose priorities
are connecting m a p s with the therapy and

(01:32:28):
the treatment that they need, as well as pure support
and connecting researchers with subjects so that this field of
study can continue. I'm not going to get into the
details of that treatment here because I'm here for Dolores.
But I think that part of showing up for Dolores
is mentioning that these organizations and these options exist and

(01:32:49):
that their intent is to reduce harm. And I know that,
based on the past several weeks, that many m a
p s have already heard this show. And so if
you are an m a P who has not started
treatment yet, please go to Before You Act dot org.
That's letter B numeral for Letter you a CT dot

(01:33:12):
org to connect with professionals and access resources. Please thank you.
And if you are a victim of sexual violence of
any kind who is seeking help or more resources, please
go to RAIN dot org. That's r A I n
N dot org And for those interested, there's also an
excellent guide on how to approach discussions with survivors of

(01:33:36):
sexual abuse from RAIN that a listener sent my way
that I will have linked in the show notes. And
I want to bring things back to Sally Horner one
last time, to a passage from Sarah Weinman in The
Real Alita describing the moment that Sally Horner was finally
returned to her mother after being abducted for twenty one months.
Quote from the plane, Sally spotted her brother in law

(01:33:58):
in the crowd. Sally wanted to get out right away,
but co and told her to wait for the other
passengers to leave first. I want to see mama, she cried.
She and her mother clung to each other for several minutes,
oblivious to the myriad flashbulbs popping at them. At first,
they were weeping too hard to speak. Then Sally said,
I want to go home. I just want to go home.

(01:34:21):
And there is so much more to be said about
this conversation, but I hope this episode has been successful
in getting it started. We need to find a way
to have this conversation. Not doing so ties back into
how Lolita was able to gather such momentum blaming its
titular character for her own abuse uninterrupted for decades, and

(01:34:42):
why so many accounts reflect the dynamics we see with
Dolores and Humber. I highly recommend reading into the work
of everyone I spoke with in this episode, and I'm
going to be including a bibliography in the notes of
this episode. But if you thought we were done with Lolita, honey,
we are only halfway there. Next week, a little bit
of bizarre levity, we're taking a look at not one,

(01:35:04):
but two failed Broadway adaptations of Lolita, neither of which
ever made it to opening night. One's a musical by
the man who wrote My Fair Lady and the man
who wrote the music for James Bond Seriously, and the
other is a gritty rewrite by Edward Albey of Who's
Afraid of Virginia Wolf Fame? Seriously. They may never have debuted,

(01:35:25):
but that didn't stop me from getting my hands on
them or talking to the women who played Lolita. Next
week on Lolita Podcast, this has been a production of
I Heart Radio. My Name is Jamie Loftus, I write
and hosted the show. My producers are the wonderful Sophia Lichtman,
Miles Gray, bet An Marcoluso, and Jack O'Brien. My editor

(01:35:48):
is the amazing Isaac Taylor. Additional research and transcription from
Ben Loftis. Music is by Zoey Blade. Theme is by
Brad Dickard. I wanted to also think my guest voices
on the episode as He's Laura as Humbert Humbert, Robert
Evans as Vladimir Nabokov, Joel Smith, Anna Josnier, Paula Vignalen,

(01:36:08):
and Aristotle Assevedo as Sigmund Freud. We'll see you next week.

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}4: Dolores, Psychology, and Survivors