Becoming Marcel Proust: Claiming Self in a Conflicted World<\/b><\/p>\n
Topics: Active Imagination, Archetypes, Art and Art Therapy, The Collective Unconscious, Family and Intimate Relationships, Grief, Individuation, Shadow, Society and Culture, Visionary Arts.<\/p>\n
Redemption through art was certainly what he wanted; what he left us were the brilliant fruits of his affection for the unredeemed world.<\/p>\n
(M. Wood, Time of the Assassin, London Review of Books, vol. 17, no. 2, 26 Jan, 1995)<\/cite><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Dipping a petite, fluted, scalloped French cake, a madeleine, into a cup of lime-flower tea became the iconic vehicle or symbol of a \u201cProustian moment\u201d: a sudden, rhapsodic union of childhood memories flowing into his adulthood present, creating a transcendent, unexpected pleasure of an \u201call-powerful joy\u201d\u2014a deeply felt, unwilled, chance encounter. Proust\u2019s narrator is at first overwhelmed by this \u201cinvoluntary memory\u201d of numinous images and sensations, but he ultimately discovers that those originally unconscious memories possess a \u201cpower of expansion… which allow(s) them to resume their place in [his] consciousness\u201d (Swann\u2019s Way<\/i><\/a>, vol. 1, p. 63). Just as in Jung\u2019s Red Book<\/i><\/a>, In Search of Lost Time<\/i><\/a>\u00a0chronicles the creation of an expanded self through the interplay of self-transformation and creative work.<\/p>\n
Proust\u2019s novel and Jung\u2019s concepts arise in the same period. This is no coincidence. Both Jung and Proust embody the “spirit of the times” at the turn of the last century that led to revolutions in painting, literature, architecture, psychology, music, science, and philosophy. For Proust and for Jung, the self is an evolving self-creation.<\/p>\n
Proust\u2019s seven-volume masterwork, In Search of Lost Time<\/i>, is an autobiographical work of fiction, a coming-of-age tale, wherein Proust\u2019s narrator discovers his vocation as a writer, at the same time chronicling and satirizing late 19th to early 20th century Belle \u00c9poque aristocratic society in France. The narrator carefully attends to and reflects on his innermost sensations, insights, and meditations. He also frequently appears to interrupt his description of an event or scene with disquisitions on a vast array of topics: the arts and science; the universal human experiences of the nature of love and its shadow side of possessiveness and jealousy; the multiple sides of a person\u2019s character; the temporal quality of memory; the conundrum of time; as well as reading, grief, loss, death, forgetting, sleep, dreaming (and more!). These seeming digressions are not tangential but flow out of, and are interwoven with, vivid characterizations, internal dialogues and experiences of the narrator, as his thoughts \u201center the action as subtly and vitally as dreams shadow our waking life\u201d (R. Shattuck, Proust\u2019s Way<\/i><\/a>, p. 38).<\/p>\n
The novel encompasses Jung\u2019s ideas of what constitutes the visionary in art, embodying both Jung\u2019s \u201cSpirit of the Times and the Spirit of the Depths.\u201d This trickster work of art is permeated with trickster characteristics of subversive humor that mocks the status-quo, psychological liminality in the narration with sensitivity to intermittences or inconstancies of feelings and consciousness, and paradoxical multiplicity and complexity that reveal and accept change as a constant both within us and without. In his struggles to find his vocation as a writer, the narrator simultaneously embodies and claims his self.<\/p>\n
Recorded on Friday, November 6th, 2020.<\/p>\n
PowerPoint:<\/span><\/b> The slides are included in the video.<\/p>\n
Reference List:<\/span> <\/b>A reference list for Judith Coopers talk is included with the download.<\/p>\n
Sample:<\/span><\/b>\u00a0https:\/\/youtu.be\/OFXmU8wOkjU<\/a><\/p>\n