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My conversation with the poet took place in the summer before the war. A year later the war broke out and robbed the world of its beauties. It destroyed not only the beauty of the countrysides through which it passed and the works of art which it met with on its path but it also shattered our pride in the achievements of our civilization, our admiration for many philosophers and artists and our hopes for a final triumph over the differences between nations and races. It tarnished the lofty impartiality of our science, it revealed our instincts in all their nakedness and let loose the evil spirits within us which we thought had been tamed forever by centuries of continuous education by the noblest minds … It robbed us of very much that we had loved, and it showed us how ephemeral were many things that we had regarded as changeless.
In Chapter 10 I already mentioned the importance of Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, which in English probably should have been translated into the title “In Search of Lost Time.” I praised Proust's acute perceptive sensitivity and perspicuous sensibility to all the arts and to all natural sensations and noted how he weaves the reader into his narrative so that each reading is, in a sense, a re-living of one's own life. Proust attempted to capture the past eternally in art and experienced it as a remedy for being-towards-death and the evanescence of everything. For him, art on the phenomenologic channel attempts to achieve a triumph over time.
Kohut argued, using the self-psychology channel, that Proust never succeeded in his task of attempting to reunite the fragments of his self with the aid of a Remembrance of Things Past: “His creative effort,