Proust's Myth of Artistic Creation

The inexplicable pleasure that comes to Marcel in certain privileged moments, the almost manic ecstasy of the reminiscences in which a chronic sense of depression (compounded of loneliness, purposelessness, and the deathlike inertia of l'habitude) gives way to a sudden feeling of self-worth, self-sufficiency, and immortality, acts, according to Marcel, “In the same way that love operates, filling me with a precious essence” (I, 45). This essence seems to invade him, to penetrate his senses from the outside, but it is no longer—if it ever was—in the external object. Now it is in himself: “or rather this essence was not in me, it was myself” (I, 45). The essence that seems to come to him from the outside also seems to rise up from somewhere deep within him, from some dark internal region inaccessible to consciousness, and this return of an unconscious memory allows him to recover and repossess his own past self, making him feel that there is a permanent identity which transcends temporal discontinuities. But, if this pleasure reminds him of love, of the feeling of being in love, it might be because the “essence” of the beloved person has seemed to enter into him, to merge with him, to become the essence of himself that he calls “moi.” So the “essence” of a special impression seems to be a kind of “transitional phenomenon”—to use the terminology of the British child-psychologist D. W. Winnicott—located in the ambiguous inner/outer space of a “symbiotic” mother-child relationship, just as Marcel's mother's kiss comes to signify her presence when she's not around, a volatile presence that he can take possession of and assimilate into himself. The attempt to “possess” his mother is active and deliberate, while the sudden infusion of the essence is felt (passively) as a penetration