Freud and Proust

Freud and Marcel Proust were contemporaries, each writing from (very) different perspectives on memory and time. In this lecture, we will be considering two texts. The first is "Note on a Mystic Writing Pad," a very short text by Freud in which he uses a child's toy as a model of how the mind remembers. The second will be parts of the famous "tea and madeleine" episode in the first volume of Proust's Recherche. The two texts are remarkably similar, and open up considerations on how literature and psychoanalysis use metaphors and myths to explicate abstract notions. Both texts will be provided for the lecture.