The Discovery of the Oedipus Complex—Episodes from Marcel Proust

What follows is a series of loosely connected episodes more poignant than coherent. It is not a systematic psychological study; it is rather a documented but brief historical observation which might at some future date serve for further and deeper psychological analysis.

The name of Marcel Proust automatically brings to mind The Remembrance of Things Past. It might seem impracticable to attempt a discussion of Proust without referring constantly to his major work. There are reasons however why we prefer here to leave this work as much as possible in the background. Proust was thirty-five years old when he embarked upon the recapture of the past, and he was forty-one when the first seven hundred pages were 'almost ready for the printer'. He was forty-three when Swann's Way first saw light. In other words, at the time he began to devote all his energy to the writings of his magnum opus, Proust was already a fully formed personality approaching middle age.

Numerous facts lead to the belief that this work was more the result of and a retreat from a severe inner crisis than of a revelatory inspiration coming to an artist in the normal course of his growth. The very secrecy with which he treated his early writing of Swann's Way is suggestive. He spent six years on the first seven hundred pages without speaking of it to anybody. The amiable loquacious Proust had never before been so secretive. Too, it seems that Proust had some difficulty producing the very thing that he was apparently determined to write and to which he devoted the most important years