Response to Maya Slater's Review of H. C. Halberstadt-Freud: Freud, Proust, Perversion and Love

Dear Mr Tuckett,

I am grateful for the perceptive remarks made by the reviewer regarding my thesis on the genesis of perversion. She recognises the central importance of my views on the mother–son relationship typical for perversion: i.e. the illusion of a blissful dyad while the hidden hatred is paired with the exclusion of the father. Thus she endorses my view of the mother of the narrator in Proust's novel as an idealised façade hiding the opposite. This is important because it took long before the riddle of the sphinx of perversion was solved in psychoanalysis, due to the centrality of the oedipal father–son rivalry for Freud. He considered the mother–son relationship as 'the altogether most perfect, the most free from ambivalence of all human relationships'.

While I agree with the reviewer that, as a rule the narrator and the author are not to be confused, in the case of Proust, that turns out to be hardly possible. Proust stated that he wanted to write 'an introspective novel', and he even called the narrator 'Marcel' twice in Remembrance. His letters, moreover, testify to the fact that he felt his mother handled him the way he implied the mother of the narrator did. She, the mother of the author, supervised his behaviour in every respect, criticised him for his relationships, and wanted to control him physically, watching his sleeping hours, his food intake, etc. In short, it would be quite naïve to view Remembrance and Proust's earlier works, like Jean Santeuil, as highly autobiographical in nature.

With regard to the novel as compared to the case history as real life versus fiction, I think the two are not as separate as Maya Slater claims them to be.

As a consequence of my reading of Proust, I take the narrator as a thinly disguised homosexual, although he is never overtly called so by Proust. To this Slater objects. I do not agree that we should abide by the thin veil Proust put on the homosexuality of the narrator. In a discussion with André Gid