MARCEL PROUSTunconscious purpose of regaining his mother's love, and of
punishing her at the same time for withholding it, that he fen ill.
During another visit to Auteuil, when Marcel was nine years
old, the family took a walk in the nearby Bois de Boulogne with
some friends. On the way back he was seized by a fit of suffoca-
tion, and seemed on the point of dying before the eyes of his
terrified father. His lifelong disease of asthma had begun.
Medically speaking, his malady was involuntary and genuine; but
asthma, we are told, is often closely linked to unconscious con-
flicts and desires, and for Proust it was to be, though a dread
master, a faithful servant. In his attacks of asthma the same causes
were at work as in his childhood fits of hysterical weeping; his
unconscious mind was asking for his father's pity and his mother's
love; and his breathlessness reproduced, perhaps, the moment of
suffocation which comes equally from tears or from sexual
pleasure. He sinned through his lungs, and in the end his lungs
were to kill him. Other great writers, Flaubert and Dostoevsky,
suffered from epilepsy, which stood in an inseparable and partly
causal relation to their art. Asthma was Proust's epilepsy. In early
years it was the mark of his difference from others, his appeal for
love, his refuge from duties which were foreign to his still un-
conscious purpose; and in later life it helped him to withdraw
from the world and to produce a work 'de si longue haleine'.
Meanwhile, however, he was only a little boy choking and
writhing in the scented air under the green leaves, in the deadly
garden of spring.