Marcel Proust’s Concept of Normal Multiple Personality, and How Alternate Personalities Can Come Forth With “Lost” Memories

“Marcel spoke about 'the different persons of whom I am composed.' Proust had already begun developing his concept of multiple selves” (1, pp. 73-74).

“At the beginning of the twentieth century, literature began giving subtler descriptions of the many facets of human personality, of their interplay, and the polypsychic structure of the human mind, as seen in the works of Pirandello, Joyce, Italo Svevo, Lenormand, Virginia Woolf, and above all in those of Marcel Proust…In a well-known description, the narrator told how, after being informed of the death of a woman, Albertine, the news was being understood successively by various parts of the personality…certain past egos may suddenly reappear, bringing forth a revival of the past. It is then one of our past egos that is in the foreground, living for us” (2, p. 167).

1. William C. Carter. Marcel Proust: A Life. New Haven, Yale University Press, 2000.

2. Henri F. Ellenberger. The Discovery of the Unconscious. New York, Basic Books, 1970.