The Contributions of Marcel Proust to Psychoanalysis

Abstract

This article is about the major contribution of Marcel Proust to psychoanalysis in his seven-part novel, A La Rècherche Du Temps Perdu (translated as Rembrance of Things Past, 1934). This work spans two decades, from 1988, when Proust writing to 1927, when the last part was published 5 years after his death. Proust, a literary scholar whose knowledge dated to the early Greeks, knew nothing of Freud or psychoanalysis. His major contributions were to the emergence of memory, specifically the exquisite details of the descriptive unconscious, which we can now explain in cognitive neuroscientific terms. Freud wanted to do this for all mental processes in 'The Project'. Proust contributed to the projective aspects of passionate love. Kernberg has pointed out that although psychoanalysts knew about transference love, idealization, and sex, love has only been a subject for us in the 1900s. Proust also wrote of jealousy as a necessary concomitant of love. He proposed that all humans had pluripotential sexuality and recognized the psychodynamics of the perversions in a way that is closer to modern psychoanalysts like Chassuguet-Smirgel. Proust was himself psychologically disabled, with an illness his father called neurasthenia, adding somatic components and abulia, inability to make decisions. We would probably recognize him today as having a borderline personality disorder, with superior cognition, depression, somatization, obsessions, compulsions, phobias, and severe anxiety, which he understood was the result of his inability to separate from his mother. Proust's findings in all these areas are compared with the psychoanalytic literature--Freud, to the present.