Bychowski stresses the oral, symbiotic character of Proust's attachment to his mother. The scene described early in La Recherche, in which little Marcel anxiously waits for his mother to come to his bedroom and kiss him good night, is used as a basis for Bychowski's exposition. He describes the wish for total mutual absorption, the Oedipal victory, and the secondary gain of illness which required the mother's ministrations. Since the maternal good-night visit inevitably ended in the mother's exasperation at her son's tenacity, Marcel's peace was shattered: '… elements of mutual anger became more outspoken and the maternal imago became endowed with elements of despotic domination'. The negative aspects of the maternal imago became transferred to the female sex in general and every love relationship was poisoned by a lack of basic trust. Proust progressed from trivial affairs with women to homosexual affairs with peers and then to homosexual affairs with his social and intellectual inferiors