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What We Learned from Proust: Psychological and Social Determinants of Snobbery and Prejudice
Author(s) -
Richards Arlene Kramer,
Spira Lucille
Publication year - 2013
Publication title -
international journal of applied psychoanalytic studies
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.314
H-Index - 15
eISSN - 1556-9187
pISSN - 1742-3341
DOI - 10.1002/aps.1307
Subject(s) - humiliation , prejudice (legal term) , feeling , social exclusion , psychology , social psychology , identification (biology) , psychoanalysis , criminology , law , political science , botany , biology
Proust's original contribution to understanding social exclusion is the focus of this paper. Proust's psycho‐logical novel, In Search of Lost Time is used to show how social exclusion is related to early feelings of exclusion from the parental couple in the family. Proust's addition shows how a child who wins his mother's attention by acting as a victim suffers from both guilt and humiliation which he may resolve by defending another victim or by excluding others if he identifies with the aggressor. This paper shows how excluding others from events, opportunities, and equality under the law can be an attempt to repair the humiliation of having been excluded. This expands Anna Freud's idea about identification with the aggressor. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.