The Proust Phenomenon and Psychoanalysis

What does Proust have to do with psychoanalysis ? The “Proust phenomenon” refers to the appearance of seemingly forgotten, emotional memories evoked by an unexpected sensation.

The archetypal example was described in Proust’s book The Search for Lost Time in which the protagonist, Marcel, tastes a madeleine cookie he has dipped in lime-blossom tea and is transported by intense emotions to memories of his childhood in Combray. Proust wrote:

I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shiver ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once, the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory—this new sensation having had the effect, which love has, of filling me with a precious essence; or rather, this essence was not in me... it was me. I had ceased now to feel mediocre, contingent, mortal. Whence could it have come to me, this all-powerful joy?

Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way

Marcel considers this intense joy; he follows it to memories of his Aunt Leonie and the town in which she lived. In other writings as well Proust examined these kinds of memories which he called “involuntary” and contrasted them with “voluntary” memories.

Voluntary memory, the memory of the intellect and the eyes, [gives] us only imprecise facsimiles of the past which no more resemble it than pictures by bad painters resemble the spring…. So we don’t believe that life is beautiful because we don’t recall it, but if we get a whiff of a long-forgotten smell we are suddenly intoxicated, and similarly we think we no longer love the dead, because we don’t remember them, but if by chance we come across an old glove we burst into tears.

Marcel Proust, Selected Letters: 1910-1917

Proust was describing a path to unarticulated memories through olfaction (the sense of smell), a route deeply entwined with emotional pathways. This intermingling helps us understand how you become suffused with the intense emotions that were part of your experiences with your mother when you smell her perfume. Scent and emotion are deeply linked.

While we can certainly observe the operation of the involuntary memory in our everyday lives, this phenomenon also operates within the psychoanalytic consulting room where we see it (and exploit it) in the course of gaining access to the unconscious. To begin with In psychoanalysis, when patients lie down on the couch, the sensations associated with the act of lying down in the presence of an authority (psychoanalysts are often experienced as parental figures) routinely are accompanied by floods of childhood memories such as memories of being put to bed, lying in cribs, viewing cracks in the ceiling seen from the supine position in bed, and so forth. It is a “regressive” act to lie down and to relinquish our usual vigilance in order to submit to sleep. But we don’t only lie down to sleep; lying down can easily elicit sexual feelings; we tend to have sex in beds while lying down. In fact, it is probably no coincidence that early Freudian theories targeted matters of childhood sexuality as they were called to mind when Freud asked his patients to lie down. (Today, psychoanalysis is sometimes conducted face-to-face; this has both advantages and disadvantages.) You can understand now how the physical experience of lying down evokes all sorts of emotional memories akin to how smells also have a most profound ability to remind us of the buried past. Proust presciently was aware of the evocative power of such sensory experiences.

Most of us are familiar with the psychoanalytic search for buried memories famously demonstrated by Freud as he explored the impact of repression on the verbal elements of memory. By undoing repression, psychoanalytic work helps patients integrate verbal and emotional content allowing greater mental freedom. But Freud also described memories that are lost not as a result of dynamic repression, but because they have never been encoded in words; such memories are accessed differently from the autobiographical memories that we can readily locate in our minds. These memories can only be accessed through living them out in transference enactments during the course of an analysis. The enactment with the analyst functions similar to a “scent” in that it is a conduit to emotional memory that has been lost to (or never gained) conscious reflection.

Enactments qualify as “iconic” memory in that they recreate the important dynamic exchanges from the past; the transference/countertransference engagements replicate crucial events from the past. Freud wisely said that what could not be “remembered” was continuously “repeated,” as it remains unmodified by self-reflective consciousness.

Most patients have these kinds of experiences from early childhood that form the templates for ways of responding to relationships of intimacy and dependency and for which they do not have words; they, therefore, don’t think to tell their analysts. Only by engaging in an emotional, intersubjective (two subjectivities are involved, theirs and yours) exchange can they communicate about these meaningful yet wordless parts of themselves. Analytic work allows patients to understand what their experiences have meant to them.

We can thank Proust for having first articulated this phenomenon that we now understand as ubiquitous in life and in analytic therapy.