Involuntary Memory (With Proust)

What distinguishes voluntary from involuntary memory? Memories one goes in search of, which can be conjured up at will, or even with some effort, we call voluntary, or ordinary memories (Josipovici, 1971). They are the memories of the intellect. They are usually anchored at a particular point in time, and when we think of them, it might be with a kind of emotional detachment. They don’t necessarily stir one up, and they may be dull in quality. We might think of a patient who says, without a great deal of feeling, ‘My father hit me that day.’

This kind of memory, Proust called the memory of habit. What habit does to memory, he said, is to strip it of its specificity, weakening its impression in an effort to help one tolerate experiences that might otherwise be completely overwhelming. Thus, instead of recalling the searing physical pain of being hit, followed by the terror of what was to come, and desperate shame connected to one’s very being, one remembers the familiar, thick thud when a fist makes contact with a face. Such a rendering of memory is part of how we ‘tame the world around us’, Josipovici (1971) writes, “...by slotting everything in it to some prior generalized notion that we have of things; so that to live in a world of habit is to live shut up in a private world, incapable of noticing what goes on around us, since everything that happens is immediately neutralized by being assimilated to what we already know...Habit deadens our response to the world by deadening our awareness of ourselves” (p. 3). It enables one to say, ‘my father hit me that day’, quite matter-of-factly, detachedly.

Involuntary memories are qualitatively distinct from this. They come unbidden, taking one quite by surprise, and seem to demand, and consist in, the re-living of an experience. They aren’t so much summoned up as seem to come from left field. They carry an affective force that voluntary memories tend not to, and as such, seem to have a powerful authenticity. At times, they may be wholly incongruous with one’s conscious recollections, as when a person who knows his father to have been cold, and at times violent, recalls being tenderly comforted by that same father, following a miserable disappointment. Such memories may have an uncanny quality, and their appearance might be called a deja vu moment.

Involuntary memories may reveal aspects of a long-forgotten world, such as childhood, and remind us that the past is not lost but has been preserved in the fabric of the psyche. They have the power to put one in touch with the self one was, long ago, and, I think, have the potential to reveal deep emotional truths about one’s subjectivity, or psychic reality. Now I’ll turn to Proust, who has given us the most famous example of involuntary memory in literature.

Proustian Memory

Paradigmatic and oft-quoted, the example is, of course, the madeleine episode. It goes as follows: The narrator returns home, cold and dispirited, and his mother offers him tea, which he rarely drinks. She sends for a little cake, called a petite madeleine, which he soaks in the tea, and he then takes a sip. He writes, ‘no sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a warm shiver ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary things that were happening to me.’ (Swann’s Way, p. 60).

The ‘exquisite pleasure’ the taste brings has the effect, Proust says, that love has. It fills him with joy, though he can’t understand why. He knows the source of this joy isn’t in the madeleine, but inside him, but he can’t yet fathom its precise origin. He sets off in search of an as yet unremembered experience, struggling to work out from what period of his life it derives, yet all his trying to remember bears no fruit. It is only when he stops reaching after understanding, and tells himself to drink the tea, that he remembers: His aunt used to give him a piece of madeleine dipped in tea when he went up to her room on Sunday mornings at Combray, where the family spent many of his childhood summers. Though “many years had elapsed during which nothing of Combray had any existence for me”, Proust writes, soon many gusts of memory unfurl: of the beloved family home at Combray, its gardens, the town, its square, the people, the streets, the church; all of these spring into being.

What was it about the madeleine that opened up this world? The sight of many madeleines over the years hadn’t produced the same effect. Still, the taste, at that moment, had been capable of unearthing a whole chain of dormant memories and associations. Proust writes, “...when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after things are broken and scattered, taste and smell alone, more fragile but more enduring, more immaterial, more persistent, more faithful, remain poised a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unflinchingly, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection; (p. 64).

“Taste and smell alone...remain poised...like souls, remembering, waiting.” They seem to contain the memories, the forgotten experience, the whole world that has been lost in the mists of time, and which may be rediscovered, but probably not when one goes searching for it. Josipovici, again: “It is always those senses which are the furthest removed from the intellect (smell, taste, touch) which awaken our past selves. Thus, it is only when Marcel tastes the madeleine, not when he sees it, that the whole of Combray floods into his mind and senses, Combray not as he had consciously remembered it, but Combray as it felt when he lived in it. And he explains this by saying that he had probably seen plenty of madeleines between that time and this, so that they too had taken on the familiar, generalized look of habit. Taste and smell, however, because they cannot be conceptualized, remain uncorrupted” (p. 9).

One can’t grasp a taste, a smell, or a feel intellectually. One can only experience it. And, when a memory arises, provoked by such a sensation, one can only re-experience or re-live it, before it can be thought about. I’ll illustrate this briefly with another example from Proust, from the Intermittences section in the fourth volume of In Search of Lost Time. Samuel Beckett (1931) thought this was the greatest passage Proust ever wrote, and it was the title almost given to the entire work. Essentially a discourse on loss and mourning, it illustrates just how changeable one’s mood, or one’s heart, is, depending on how one is remembering a person or experience.

The narrator has traveled to Balbec, a place he has previously visited with his grandmother, who is now dead. After a long journey, he reaches his hotel room and, exhausted, he bends down to take off his boots. He suddenly experiences the ‘upheaval of [his] entire being’ (Sodom and Gomorrah, p. 210). He has a complete and involuntary recollection of his grandmother, who had, during their previous stay, helped him off with his boots when he had sought her out for comfort, being in a state of distress. Now, though she had been dead for over a year, as he relives this experience, the narrator is shaken by the realization that his grandmother is dead. How does he account for this?

What dawns upon the narrator is the extent to which he has forgotten his grandmother. It is only when, via this unbidden memory, she becomes once more fully alive to him, when he feels himself to be with her, that he is jolted into the emotional knowing that she is dead, and then he loses her once more. And just as she comes alive, so does the self that the narrator was when they were together at Balbec. Proust writes, ‘I was now solely the person who had sought a refuge in his grandmother’s arms, had sought to obliterate the traces of sorrow by smothering her with kisses...I remember how, and an hour before the moment when my grandmother had stooped in her dressing-gown to unfasten my boots...I had felt that I could never, in my need to feel her arms around me, live through the hour that I had still to spend without her’ (p. 212).

Now, just as he feels the same need, he realizes she will never again be able to comfort him in that way. He writes, ‘I had only just, on feeling her for the first time alive, real, making my heart swell to breaking point, on finding her at last, learned that I had lost her forever’. And so it is that the perturbations of memory are linked to the intermittencies of the heart. “It is fallacious to suppose that all our inner wealth, our past joys, all our sorrows, are perpetually in our possession...If they remain within us, for most of the time, it is in an unknown region where they are of no use to us.” (p. 211-212).

Yet, as in the madeleine episode, and as the narrator pulls on his boots at Balbec, these joys and sorrows may be re-found. In the intermittences section, Proust fully describes how all of our experiences are preserved ‘in a context of sensations’. And since they were originally experienced in such a context -- amidst tastes, smells, sounds -- then the re-experiencing of these sensations may lead to the recovery of these experiences, to the return of lost time.

What does all of this have to do with psychoanalytic work? I think a major part of the work of psychoanalysis consists in the recovery of lost time, or lost experience, in the Proustian sense. That is, in an analysis, one has the opportunity to revive and work over experiences which one might have stumbled through rather unthinkingly or unreflectively at the time; experiences which may have been formative but for a myriad of reasons one could not be fully alive to, and which instead were trudged through, forgotten, repressed, split off, and so on. In analysis, there is the potential to relive such experiences and uncover deep emotional truths in the process. Affectively resonant involuntary memories that arise during analysis can powerfully bring to life and integrate forgotten experiences.

References

Beckett, S. (1931). Proust.

Josipovici, G. (1971). The world and the book: A study of modern fiction.

Proust, M. (1913/2003). Swann’s way. (C. K. Scott Moncrieff, Trans.)

Proust, M. (2002). Sodom and Gomorrah .(C. K. Scott Moncrieff, Trans.)