Proust et le moi divisé: 'La Recherche' creuset de la psychologie expérimentale (1874–1914) (review)

The dominant philosophy of the last quarter of the nineteenth century, Bizub argues, was 'la psychologie expérimentale fondée sur la division de conscience' (p. 17). Literature, he continues, is always influenced by the reigning philosophy of the day and if we study the genesis and structuring of A la recherche du temps perdu in the context of the work of the leading proponents of this philosophy, we will find a novel which, now explicitly, now in a more occluded way, narrates from start to finish a psychotherapeutic cure as was then administered to those suffering from, amongst other disorders, the dividing or doubling of the self. Appropriately, this is a book of two parts. Bizub aims to fill a gap between criticism dealing with the medical in Proust's work and that which examines it through the prism of psychoanalysis. The first part (the most usefully informative) considers the cases of four patients who underwent psychotherapy towards the end of the nineteenth century, one of them in the hands of the novelist's father. The second concentrates on the treatment Proust himself received in 1905, and how this, and the thinking and writings of Paul Sollier, the doctor in charge of the treatment, relate to the early development of his then inchoate project. Part one is the most valuable for Proustians unversed in the workings of what was a dynamic, quickly developing area of science and thought (as Bizub notes, it was largely as a result of the observation of the four cases he examines that the chair in comparative and experimental psychology at the Collège de France was created in 1888). Bizub portrays an environment of enquiry and experiment in which Proust, as the son of one of its key figures, as a 'licence' student and as a patient, was involved. Identity, memory, observation and sensation, which would all become paramount for Proust's narrator, are key factors for the patients who, during their intermittent 'conditions secondes' act as others. Bizub relates this problematic split to Proust's contention that 'un livre est le produit d'un autre moi'. The narrator is considered as a divided self, yet Bizub fails to account for the difference between the patients who periodically live 'une nouvelle vie qui n'a rien à voir avec l'ancienne' (p. 119) and the narrator whose everyday life transpires to be precisely that upon which his creative 'moi profond' will work. The materials supporting part two are predominantly Proustian 'avant-textes'; the argument is often laboured and less convincing than in the earlier part. Throughout the chapters are split into short paragraphs in turn grouped into small sections; add to this an irritatingly insistent use of exclamation marks and the result is a bitty self-interrupting text denied any real flow, especially in the second part. Bizub's conclusions happily dispense with these tics and reiterate clearly the movements of his argument. Whilst there is undoubtedly a rich interplay between experimental psychology and Proust's project, opinions about the achievements of this book will, most likely, be divided.