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Marcel Proust possesses his impressions and merges them with remembrance to both destroy their present quality and reaffirm it at the same time. This is analogous to the earliest struggle with the other: either to merge, be enveloped, and lose one's separate existence or to become, individuate, and lose/refind oneself in separateness. Proust's myth of artistic creation, spoken through the narration of his novel, is similar. It is viewed via identification with the mother's vantage point: she (or the artist) must die to give birth to her son (or the work of art). However, the art will rediscover and preserve her existence by its unique separateness. Splitter once again dwells on the adequacy of Proust's metaphors for the containment of an exquisite struggle, the earliest attempt to solve the balance of attachment to and separateness from mother. The author explores many subtle variations of this theme in Remembrance of Things Past and also in the writings of D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce, and Euripides. Like Jung, he speculates whether the myth of Dionysus, which hints at the earliest relations between sons and mothers, does not carry explanatory force equal to the story of Oedipus.