International Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies, 10(1):75-86.
Proust's original contribution to understanding social exclusion is the focus of this paper. Proust's psycho-logical novel, In Search of Lost Time is used to show how social exclusion is related to early feelings of exclusion from the parental couple in the family. Proust's addition shows how a child who wins his mother's attention by acting as a victim suffers from both guilt and humiliation which he may resolve by defending another victim or by excluding others if he identifies with the aggressor. This paper shows how excluding others from events, opportunities, and equality under the law can be an attempt to repair the humiliation of having been excluded. This expands Anna Freud' idea about identification with the aggressor.
Writers of novels give us a window into the passions that drive social exclusion through their imaginative creations. Proust's In Search of Lost Time is particularly rich in this regard. In fact Probst-Solomon (2001) pointed out that Proust is the first major twentieth century writer to make prejudice a central theme in his work. His memoir-like novel, conveyed as if it were seen though the eyes of a narrator, stimulated us, among other things, to think about how the social and psychological intertwine. His depiction of the social mores of characters from all walks of life and different developmental stages suggests one root of why a person might find pleasure in excluding others or casting them as dangerous outsiders.
A Scream Goes Through the House is Weinstein's (2004) metaphor for works, like that of Proust, that touch the minds and souls of its readers. Literature exposes readers to the feelings and thoughts of a writer› characters, incidentally or deliberately teaching about life and its
vicissitudes. The rich landscape Proust presents to his readers highlights the connection between art and life; the boundaries are permeable. Great books fill readers with excitement and expand the imagination; they allow us to consider what might make the writer' heroes, heroines, and villains behave or feel as they are portrayed. Lesser (1957) a literary scholar influenced by psychoanalytic theory showed that great works engage the whole psyche rather than just gratify the id. Such reflections by the readers can lead to thoughts about what motivates real people to take actions that otherwise seem mysterious. As the reader confronts unfamiliar circumstances described in a novel, what the author has shown him/her might better enable a person to connect with a new a situation, a point implicit in Victor Brombert's (2004) memoir Trains of Thought.
When reading a novel, some readers internalize and digest the words and ideas expressed by the author's characters. The capacity to use what we internalize and our associations can serve as a bulwark against loneliness and the sense of alienation. Alternatively, where an author's work might make the reader too uncomfortable, defenses might arise disallowing that person from seeing herself, or others, as like the author's creations. This idea might be represented in the statement: “It's only fiction.” Despite the tendency of some to create distance for themselves from novels that spark painful feelings, others have used literature, including myths, to better understand the vicissitudes of life (Mendelson, 2007). For example, Freud used Greek mythology to communicate his theory of neurosis and may even have been inspired to create his theory by what he assimilated from the Greeks.
Proust engaged the interest of many writers, psychoanalysts and readers. The various ways in which he drew in his readers in ways that resonated with their own feelings and experiences is well illustrated by Aciman (2004), who asked a number of prominent authors and literary critics to discuss a favorite scene from Proust's In Search of Lost Time (2003). Psychoanalysts found much in Proust to elaborate on and expand their psychological theory. Poland (2003) concentrated on Proust›s view and demonstration of reading and writing as a sublimation that can remake one›s world. Miller (1956) and Halberstadt-Freud (1991) were
interested in analyzing the author from the evidence of his imaginative productions. Halberstadt-Freud developed her theory of perversion by way of an analysis of Proust's work. Kohut (1977) saw the hero of In Search of Lost Time as suffering from a fragmented self's tragic man, one in search of a self—and different from classical guilty man; one who suffers from within the residue of his Oedipal resolution. More recently, Fried (2008) creatively used Proust's portrayal of the hero's treatment of Albertine to illuminate the impact of the analyst's planned absences on both patient and analyst.
We used Proust's novel to show how, for some people, continuous longing for love, though painful, might be more satisfying than requited love (Richards & Spira, 2012). We saw a connection between how a child and his parents negotiate the challenges of the Oedipal phase—the time when we are longing for the exclusive love of one of our parents while in the throes of ambivalence toward the other parent—not only has psychological impact but wider social ramifications as well. We will elaborate that idea here.
Is excluding other people a social or psychological phenomenon? It depends on how you look at it. For example, one young woman told her therapist that she could never date a man from her father's ethnic background; in her experience men from that cultural group, pride themselves on having more than one woman at a time. She understood his infidelity as socially determined. Focusing on the psychological aspects of such behavior would address the woman's perception of her relationship to her father and to her mother and her own wishes, fears and moral judgments.
That being excluded can be painful is obvious; that the excluder suffers may be less apparent. The pleasure in excluding is the sense of power, but power implies exercising free will and therefore leads to responsibility and its handmaiden: guilt. Social norms play a role in what is shameful and what is a source of pride. Excluding another person serves a defensive purpose as well. Often the impulse to exclude arises from the shame and sense of being degraded by the experience of having been excluded.
Proust's memoir-like novel, In Search of Lost Time develops understanding of social and psychological aspects of social exclusion. His psychologically rich character portrayals depict heroes, heroines, and anti-heroes from all spheres of society. He describes in affecting detail how the painful experiences of childhood motivate adult social behavior. His work shows how social snobbery can spring from psychological roots—the adult assures himself that rather than be excluded, he can exclude others. That snobbery is mainly on the basis of class; prejudice excludes others on the basis of race, religion, gender and/or sexual orientation.
Proust himself witnessed social snobbery and experienced prejudice. Though baptized as a Catholic, the religion of his father, he was Jewish by virtue of being the son of a Jewish woman; as a gay man he was a member of another excluded and devalued group. He himself, comparing being Jewish with being homosexual, believed that the rationalization for excluding both kinds of people is to accuse them of criminality:
… like those judges for whom to be a Jew is to be a traitor-that homosexuality can easily lead to murder; …. (Proust, 1997, p. 219)
He believed neither Jews nor homosexuals were treated fairly in society and under the law. His Catholic father reinforced his belief that he would have been better off not associating with Jews or going to a hotel that had too many of them as guests (White, 2009).
Proust's hero-narrator, sometimes referred to as M or Marcel, eagerly sought his mother's love in a way that appeared successful. The narrator shares many characteristics with the author Proust though there are major differences—unlike the historical Proust, his character is heterosexual and an only child. Proust's hero is not explicitly a member of any excluded group. The novel introduces the theme of exclusion when we are told about a young boy suffering in his bedroom because he is exiled from his parents's dinner table. The boy's parents are entertaining their rich neighbor Swann; Swann's wife, Odette, has not been invited because of rumors about her sexual past. She is excluded from their social circle because she had been kept by rich lovers. Her sexual choices give the
bourgeois family the right to exclude her from society. But what did the young boy do to be excluded? This night the young boy does not get his good night kiss; his sexual wish gets him into trouble just as Odette's sexual behavior earned her social obloquy.
Unhappy about not getting the kiss he desires, he sets out on a campaign to get it. He solicits the maid to give his mother a note asking her to come to his room. Before handing over the note he realizes that this maid is too protective of his parents to casually interrupt them. To counteract what he sees as her servility, he tells her that his mother is expecting to hear from him. He hopes to make her feel as if she is acting on his mother's request rather than his own. The boy's plan works in that the maid sees to it that his mother gets his note. Believing that the note will bring his mother to him, he calms down. But when he gets word that his mother has said that she has no reply, he sees that his ploy did not work and once again feels painful longing. He provokes exclusion by trying too hard to get included in his mother's attention.
Proust's boy longs for his mother's kiss. He believes that he can avoid the pain of being excluded by pursuing her until she gives in. He knows that dinner will eventually end and his mother will have to ascend the staircase to get to her room. He chooses to wait on the staircase to catch her. When she sees him there, she attempts to encourage him to go back to bed. He experiences her as being annoyed with him. His father enters the scene and seeing the boy's suffering becomes alarmed that his son will become sick if he does not get his mother's attention. He urges his wife to stay with their son. She does so reluctantly and spends the time lying beside him reading him stories.
One story she reads is about a young orphan boy befriended by a woman named Madeleine who acts like a surrogate mother. When the child in the story grows up, he falls in love with Madeleine, and eventually persuades her to marry him. The boy wins his “mother” and lives happily ever after. Is Proust implying that a child who hears such a story and gets his mother to sleep with him can take it to mean that he can also get to marry his mother when he grows up? Does the boy in Proust's story feel content or powerful? Not as he tells it.
Proust's hero sees beyond the moment when his wish was gratified. What little Marcel's persistence has gained humiliates him. He recognizes that his mother did not want to stay but did so only because the father asked her to. The father feared the boy would make himself sick; the reader surmises that he felt pity for Marcel. Marcel realizes that he has caused his mother pain; he sees that she looks sad and deduces that it is because she perceives him not to be strong enough to manage growing up. He feels guilt about causing his mother pain and shame about eliciting his father's pity. The next morning he feels regretful. The narrator writes of the young Marcel's regret: “And if I had dared now, I should have said to Mamma: ‘No I don't want you to, you mustn't sleep here‘” (Proust, 1913/2003, vol. 1, p. 51). It is from this time that the boy thinks of himself as a sickly child.
As an older man Marcel happens to see a copy of Francois le Champi and recalls that crucial night of his childhood. He says:
… during the night that was perhaps the sweetest and saddest of my life when I had alas! … won from my parents that first abdication of their authority from which, later, I was to date the decline of my health and my will, and my renunciation, each day disastrously confirmed, of a task that daily became more difficult…. (Proust, 1927/2003, vol. 6, p. 287)
Taking Proust's work as a novel in the style of memoir, the narrator's description of the bedtime scene can be seen as a screen memory for other experiences where he was both over-stimulated by his need for closeness with his mother and humiliated by his father's condescending indulgence.
Recaptured memories may be understood as involuntary memory and memory screens. The latter condensed memories cover over ones that our psyche cannot as easily tolerate: they are attempts to hide us from pain.
As we recall memories, often, what we remember is not what we actually
experienced (Lehrer, 2008). Freud's archeological metaphor seems to apply here; what we excavate, and bring to light, becomes transformed by the process of the excavation. A memoir writer has the liberty of weaving those now transformed involuntary recollections and screen memories into his narrative. As we know, when we mine our unconscious, or even tap into our preconscious thoughts, distortions occur. In short, it is useful to think of what is reported in a memoir as the author's remembered version or vision of his experience (Birkerts, 2007); our memories are not without defense. This process might have contributed to Proust's work. This recalled moment comes after the reader has already witnessed the growing adolescent and the adult man only achieving pleasure at the cost of great pain. His Oedipal victory left him full of guilt and shame for the rest of his life.
Proust also shows a woman who suffers from Oedipal victory. Mlle. Vinteuil, brought up by her adoring father after her mother dies when the daughter was still a young child. Clearly an Oedipal victor, she becomes an adult who loves women and feels spiteful hatred for her father, which she acts out with her lover. The young narrator looks through an unshaded window to see Mlle. Vinteuil dare her lover to threaten to spit on a picture of her father in a sado-masochistic love ritual. Love and aggression are linked as is the typically the case in life. Could it be that the aggression allowed Mlle. Vinteuil to withstand the village ostracism that she suffered for being a gay woman? Or, as Halberstadt-Freud (1991) suggests, the inclusion of the sado-masochism love ritual may be Proust's way of having his character dis-identify from her masochistic father. Her open sexual play with her lover makes them a topic of gossip; members of the community pity her father. The narrator describes himself as a child passing the home of M. Vinteuil while on a walk with his parents. The little boy was aware that:
People said: “That poor M. Vinteuil must be blinded by fatherly love not to see what everyone is talking about-a man who is shocked by the slightest loose word letting his daughter bring a woman like that to live under his roof! … He may be sure it isn't music that she's teaching his daughter. (Proust, 1913/2003, vol. 1, p. 207)
Mlle. Vinteuil and her lover are excluded from the society of the narrator, his family and their friends. They are excluded from the social life of their little town. Prejudice against lesbians forces them to find another context for their lives. Mlle. Vinteuil and her lover become part of a group of lesbian artistic women who share camaraderie, creativity, and love not unlike the situation of a number of lesbian women during Proust's time (Souhami, 2005). They exclude the heterosexual world that excluded them. This is an example of how one gains power by excluding others. We see with the situation of Mlle. Vinteuil one of Proust's contributions to understanding social exclusion—how the psychological and the social are intertwined.
The social definition of a character's status determines personal choices as well. Proust's haughty intellectual character Baron Charlus is homosexual. He takes an uneducated and unscrupulous tailor as his lover and closest companion. Does knowing that he would be rejected if society knew that he was homosexual cause him to choose a lover who is degraded? Even though Swann has a Jewish mother, he has entrée into aristocratic circles where ladies of the nobility are interested in him. Rather than choose one of them, he falls in love with the degraded Odette with whom he had a tumultuous courtship. Does he choose a beloved who is as socially unacceptable as his mother would have been to many in society portrayed in the novel? These characterizations tempt us to twist Lord Acton's famous statement about politics to: Prejudice tends to make strange bedfellows.
Proust exquisitely depicts social snobbery based on class as well as sexual orientation. He shows snobbery within and among all levels of society. Proust's Duchess de Guermantes, behaves contemptuously towards anyone whom she considers less sophisticated, aristocratic, or cultured than herself. That includes almost everyone. A matron at a public toilet excludes an indigent woman while toadying up to bourgeois patrons. The narrator likens the matron's condescending behavior to that of a duchess: the society dinner is the duchesses's social realm; the matron's
toilet is hers. Housekeepers are also snobs: one bullies an inexperienced kitchen helper.
But the social snobbery is not simple disdain for those lower on the social scale. The bourgeoisie exclude the aristocrats: the hero's grandmother initially resists overtures made to her by an aristocratic acquaintance whom she knew from childhood. The grandmother believes that nice people associate only within their own social class.
Her grandson, M, is determined to break down barriers. He is the same character who got his mother to sleep the night in his room. As a young man he uses that same persistence to ingratiate himself with the aristocratic Guermantes set. Proust himself crossed the barrier from a bourgeois family into the society of aristocrats and great artists when he was a young man. He used his wit and entertaining skills to make himself a desirable companion for people of greater achievement and social status than he himself had at that time. Kristeva (1993) sees this blending of fact and fiction as an overarching theme in Proust's work and as an example of the fluidity of barriers. Under certain circumstances, social barriers expand and contract as time compresses.
As Proust mixes fiction with fact, he provides insights into the nature of prejudice. He uses the Dreyfus case as part of his narrative. Dreyfus was a French military officer convicted of treason. This became a cause célèbre in France. One faction claimed that he was framed because he was a Jew while the other side believed he was guilty of spying against France for Germany. Proust's characters clash: Dreyfusards versus anti-Dreyfusards. The Dreyfusards are M, Swann and the young noble St Loup. In the real world the Dreyfus affair separated those of the Jewish “race” from the old aristocracy of the army officers. Even those like Proust who had been baptized and others who had converted to Christianity were seen as of the Jewish “race.” French artists like Zola and middle-class people who shared the values of hard work, learning and the philosophy of liberty, equality and brotherhood sided with the Dreyfusards. The French old guard aristocrats and peasants wanted the conviction to stand because they believed that reversal would upset the
social order. Proust has an anti-Dreyfus character assert that you cannot be both a Jew and a Frenchman. Proust uses the Dreyfus affair in his novel as a metaphor. The viciousness of ethnocentrism and religious bigotry is on a continuum with the viciousness of the small town attack on the lesbian lovers.
Most interestingly, Proust alerts us to the ironic capriciousness of prejudice. Odette Swann had not been welcome at either aristocratic or bourgeois homes even after marrying the wealthy Swann. When she allies herself with the anti-Dreyfusards she suddenly finds herself welcome in aristocratic circles. Just as Odette becomes acceptable to St Loup's aristocratic relatives, St Loup, Swann and the narrator fall out of favor with those aristocrats who had formerly welcomed them. Having similar prejudices serves to draw otherwise disparate people together. He shows how social barriers can give way when they conflict with racial prejudice.
If Freud taught us that the Oedipus myth is a story of exclusion from the loving couple, Proust shows us that exclusion from the social group is the heir of Oedipal conflict in the social sphere. Social exclusion can be seen as a way to mitigate the pain of Oedipal humiliation. By turning passive exclusion into active exclusiveness, the social snob does to others what she felt had been done to her. Proust shows little Marcel longing for his mother while she is at dinner with adults. The dinner guest Swann becomes the barrier between little Marcel and his mother with the Oedipal rivalry displaced from his father to the visitor who represents the intrusion of society into the family. Thus Proust links the social scene with the Oedipal rivalry and longing. In this way he establishes the link between the Oedipal exclusion and the social exclusion that later gets played out when the adult M wants to keep his lover for himself and away from her social circle.
Freud showed how the child who was not the Oedipal winner suffered from revenge fantasies. Proust shows the child who wins by suffering, spending much of his life having fantasies of winning by losing. The side effect of Marcel getting his father's permission to have his mother stay the night with him is accepting as his identity the sufferer from illness,
the child who is no threat to the father or any other man, the mama's boy who can only suffer at the hands of women whom he loves. As an adult he becomes a torturer of his beloved, Albertine, because he cannot allow himself to be excluded from her presence. He keeps her prisoner so that she would have to cheat on him in order to have any life of her own. He repeats the triangle of himself with his mother and father but transforms it into the triangle of his love, himself and other women. Here again Proust transforms the personal into the social when he describes M's jealous fantasy that his beloved is actually having sex not with a single other person, but with a whole group of lesbians. He is jealous of the group of women, not simply of another woman.
A second way in which Proust develops a Freudian idea is the extension of identification with the aggressor into the social realm. Proust shows how the excluded Mlle. Vinteuil and her lover create a social circle of lesbians and exclude the villagers who excluded them. Once again the sexual and the social are linked in the psychological realm and use the same adaptive strategy. For M identifying with the aggressor was not adaptive. He tried to become the excluder with his lover, but it only brought pain on himself. It worked for him when he found his way into the Guermantes set where others were excluded. It also worked for Odette when she joined the anti-Dreyfusards who had excluded her and were now excluding Dreyfusards.
* In the novel, Proust shows how common ideas and ideals fuse a social group, thus extending Freud's (1921) idea. For Freud the group is formed around love for a leader and a sense of equality among the members. Proust shows how the group can be protected by having a boundary which consists of a differentiation between the members of the group who love each other and non-members who are hated. Hating the Jews made the French anti-Dreyfusards feel closer to each other in proportion as they felt hatred for him and the other Jews.
Another original idea in Proust is the power of identification with the victim. While Anna Freud (1936/1966) later described the defensive use of identification with the aggressor, Proust used his own understanding
of human nature to show the defensive use of identification with the victim. M enters a social realm by identifying with Dreyfus. Since Dreyfus was disempowered and humiliated, M could see him as a fellow sufferer who was also weak, fragile and unable to cope. By supporting Dreyfus M attempts to undo being a victim, but at the same time becomes a member of a group that identifies itself with the victim. Being a member of a group gave him power; being a member of the group enables him to transform weakness into power. In the novel, such groups are comprised of homosexuals, lesbians, Jews, and intellectuals.
For Proust group membership is more than sharing values, or ethnicity or religion. Social bonding and perceived sameness are important. As Begley (2009) adds, Dreyfus never shared in the gambling, drinking, and whoring that was the after hours routine of many in the military establishment. Begley implies that because Dreyfus did not share their pleasures, he did not enter their circle of mutual trust; he did not become part of their group. Thus he became vulnerable to scapegoating. Proust shows in his depiction of military life that sharing after-hours comradeship increases social bonding. In Proust's lesbian scenes forbidden behavior fosters bonding even more than sharing activities that are not forbidden.
In Proust's own life his alliance with the Dreyfusards created new bonds and strengthened others. Looking at the Dreyfus affair from the point of view of Proust's mother, Bloch-Dano (2007) shows how Mme. Proust's sons aligned with their mother. This alliance in support of Dreyfus, formed between mother and sons, excluded Monsieur Proust, who could not accept that the military establishment would have found Dreyfus guilty if he were not so. If the Oedipal wish was alive in the sons, it played out as a forbidden wish that allied them as Jews (Probst-Solomon, 2001) just as the lesbians allied with each other and as the officers bonded. Tadie (1996/2000) differs here and suggests Proust's support of Dreyfus was spurred by social bonding with his school chums and literary friends rather than a result of any allegiance to the Jewish religion.
An example of the bond between Proust (1957) and his mother forged on the Dreyfus affair is the following letter written by Proust to his mother in September 1899:
… Don't be too sad about the verdict. It's bad for the army, for France, for the judges who had the cruelty to expect poor exhausted Dreyfus to repeat yet again the effort of summoning up his
courage … And nothing can go less than well for him now, morally in the world's esteem, physically in the liberty which I suppose is restored to him at this very moment. As for the verdict itself it will be judicially repealed. Morally it's repealed already…. (Proust, 1957, p. 73)
In this letter the adult Proust is soothing his mother rather than needing her to soothe him. Like Marcel and M, Proust feels empathy for his mother, wants her to suffer less and tries to make that happen.
Proust's hero regains his self-esteem and thus his own power when, as an adult, he sees an antique edition of the novel his mother read to him the evening of that fateful night of his childhood: Francois le Champi (George Sand 1850/1977). He recaptures the feelings and eventually masters them. Poland (2003) believes that what started out as M's longing for his mother developed into longing for love and acceptance. That longing was restructured in a new compromise formation that allowed M to see people in an unidealized way that, at the same time, allowed him to see himself as older, stronger and able to be a writer. Having written that letter, Proust realizes that he has a story worth telling. The adult M realizes that he has a story worth telling when he goes to a party and sees the society people from his past with the children grown, the young now old and power transferred to a younger generation.
In current life humiliation and exclusion pervade schools and other institutions. Understanding that such behaviors come at least in part from the experience of having felt excluded oneself and from the inevitable experience of having felt powerless and in need of protection while growing up is beautifully exemplified in Proust's work. Being an Oedipal “victor” comes at a great price to self esteem and adult development (Gil, 1987; Halberstadt-Freud, 1991; Lasky, 1984). It can exacerbate not only feelings of guilt but also ones of humiliation. Oedipal victory can also propel one to exclude others and/or to fight on behalf of the excluded as Proust showed.
Do officially sanctioned humiliation and exclusion still pervade schools and other institutions? Corbett (2009) reported that a school in the south holds a senior prom for the African American students and another one for its white students. The students say that they want one prom with all students invited. Some say it is harmless tradition to hold two proms. We believe it was prejudice. By dividing the students according to race, the white parents were humiliating the black students in an act of prejudice. If the parents claimed that the black students could not afford the expensive white prom, they would be humiliating them by social snobbery. By claiming that each group would prefer to be separate they were ignoring the students's feelings. Not having one's feelings understood about not being included can sting; not having ones feelings understood about wanting to be inclusive can sting also. However we categorize this exclusionary behavior, early experience and the intertwining of the psychological and social play a role. Understanding that such behaviors come from the experience of having felt excluded oneself and from the inevitable childhood experience of having felt powerless is beautifully exemplified in Proust's work. Being excluded from the parental couple's love-making humiliates the child, but replacing the parent as the best beloved makes the child an Oedipal victor. Being an Oedipal “victor” comes at a great price to adult development (Gil, 1987; Halberstadt-Freud, 1991; Lasky, 1984). It inhibits growth by provoking guilt. When it is gained by exhibiting helplessness and evoking pity such victory produces humiliation as well.
Humiliation can also propel a person to humiliate others by excluding them or to oppose the humiliation of others. Proust himself opposed the humiliation of Dreyfus as his hero M did in the novel by becoming Dreyfusards. Becoming an adult requires accepting responsibility for participation in society. It also requires that each person finds a way to satisfy her/his loving and aggressive impulses without hurting him/her self or others. That some of us lose this struggle is unfortunate. Recently (Garelick, 2011) a celebrated fashion designer was drinking in a bar when he allegedly excoriated a female patron; the woman was unknown to him. He was reported to have been overheard saying: “Dirty
Jewish face, you should be dead. Your boots are of the lowest quality, your thighs are of the lowest quality. You are so ugly I don't want to see you. I am John Galliano.” Proust's work suggests that such outbursts derive from the person reacting to childhood experiences where he felt humiliated. The perpetrator discharges his pain by causing his victim to feel it. By announcing his own name he asserts his identity; he asserts that he is not the victim; he exults in being the perpetrator.
It seems that Proust found a way to undo his humiliation by embracing his creativity and contributing to society by standing up for justice in the Dreyfus affair. Poland (2003) concluded that he undid his humiliation finally by writing his books.
The point of this paper is that including the social along with psychological understanding (Hamer, 2002) better enables us to understand our tendencies to exclude others and our responses to being excluded. Becoming an adult requires accepting responsibility for participation in society. Including the social along with psychological understanding also makes our interpretations to our patients more applicable to real life.