Against Sublimation: How Proust Became a Writer

What could Marcel Proust teach us about infantile sexuality? Does one become a writer with the help of, or in spite of, our primitive unconscious drives? Does Freud’s concept of sublimation explain this process? What if sublimation were only a myth, as rarely observed in the artist's creative process as it is in the so-called latency period to which sublimation is linked? Far from being a sublime transformation of the sexual into the cultural, writing novels attests to the irreducible presence of the sexual unconscious of the child throughout the entire intellectual life of the adult. Writing is not a movement of purification through elevation; it is a descent toward what is low, hidden, unclean. Proust's novel remains an impure, messy, human artifact, torn and dismembered by the unceasing drive to write, an “objet petit a,” as Lacan puts it, around which the drive turns without ending.

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MICHEL SCHNEIDER has been practicing psychoanalysis in Paris since 1976. Trained first at the Lacanian École Freudienne de Paris (1969-72), he then trained at the Association Psychanalytique de France (1980-86). He was the main assistant to J. B. Pontalis at the Nouvelle Revue de Psychanalyse (1981-88), in which he published more than a dozen articles. Since 1980, he has published 23 books on music, opera, psychoanalytic readings of literature, and two essays on Marcel Proust, Maman (Gallimard, 1999) and L'auteur, l'autre (Gallimard, 2014). He has also written four novels, including Marilyn, dernières séances, a fictional account of the last three years of the life of Marilyn Monroe and her treatment by Ralph Greenson. On the history and theory of psychoanalysis, he is the author of Blessures de mémoire (1980) and Voleurs de mots (1985), both published in Pontalis' collection at Gallimard, Connaissance de l'inconscient. He is also the author of two books published by Presses Universitaires de France in the series Le fil rouge: Lacan, les années fauves (2010) and Lu et entendu (2012).

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