The question as to whether Marcel Proust (1871–1922) read or at least knew about Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) is invariably raised whenever it is a matter of situating Proust in relation to psychoanalysis. This is so even though Proust himself had provided a categorical answer that could have sufficed to put an end to any further enquiry. Responding to Roger Allard's review of Sodom and Gomorrah in 1921, in which the critic had made a rapprochement between aspects of the novel and Freud's theory of the dream held by what Allard called the ‘Freudian’ school of thought, which saw the dream as ‘an effort on the part of the physical being for fulfilling an unavowable desire’, Proust had hastened to state that if he had not understood ‘the sentence on Freud’, it was because ‘he had not read his books’ (Corr, xx, 447).

The question, then, as to what unites Freud and Proust with respect to their modernity is not new. Allard's review, or René Rousseau's 1922 article entitled ‘Marcel Proust et l'esthétique de l'inconscient’ [‘Marcel Proust and the Aesthetics of the Unconscious’] are some of the earliest rapprochements, before Jacques Rivière delivered a series of lectures in 1924 under the heading of ‘Marcel Proust. L'Inconscient dans son œuvre’, later published in the Nouvelle Revue française, which were important for disseminating both Proust's work and Freud's ideas during the 1920s. These articles follow soon after the first translations of Freud's work into French, and it is useful to recall a few dates. It was only in 1907 that the Swiss psychiatrist Alphonse Maeder published didactic articles on Freud's theories. It was also in 1907 that Proust published his most ‘psychoanalytical’ article, ‘Sentiments filiaux d'un parricide’ [‘Filial Sentiments of a Parricide’], based on Henri Van Blarenberghe's killing of his mother, which ends, ‘like one of Freud's essays’. In 1913, Emmanuel Régis and Angelo Hesnard published a landmark article on ‘La doctrine de Freud et de son école’ in L'Encéphale, the same year that Swann's Way appeared. For these authors, ‘Freud's system’ was said apparently to consist in ‘one of the most important scientific movements of the current psychological epoch’. The authors had reservations towards it, because it was after all a ‘medico-philosophical system’.