Witnessing and imagination: Proust, trauma, and the expansion of consciousness

Abstract

I treat Proust’s Á la Recherche du Temps Perdu as a fictional case history centered around dynamic tension between dissociation, memory, and creativity. I argue that three pivotal breakthroughs of long dissociated memories and feelings in Proust’s novel result from thawing within a dyadically-determined dissociative process, not simply the chance triggering of involuntary memories as the narrator supposes. Dissociation and its thawing are states of consciousness guided by the same dynamics that enable witnessing to transcend dissociation in the context of trauma. Witnessing allows experience to “come alive.” Weaving together elements of Tronick’s dyadic expansion of consciousness, implicit relational knowing, moments of meeting, transitional phenomena, Modell’s ideas on affect and metaphor, Donnel Stern’s writings on Nachträglichkeit and the intersubjective field, and observations from dreams and psychedelic states, I mine Proust’s text to claim that imagination is constrained by what we intersubjectively imagine another knowing or reacting to. Conversely, what we cannot imagine another knowing remains unknowable.