ABSTRACT
The well-known episode of the goodnight kiss in Remembrance of Things Past deserves our particular attention. Marcel Proust comes back to this episode over and over again to explain how the narrator’s love life came to be perverted. The goodnight kiss episode represents previous, comparable but forgotten painful memories, and symbolises the desperate need for the mother’s love. The narrator, a frightened little boy, is sent to bed by himself without his mother’s customary goodnight kiss and the ritual that goes with it. After the goodnight kiss episode, mother decides to abandon her attempts at raising her son according to her strict moral norms and principles. The goodnight kiss episode is strongly reminiscent of the first period of life as described by the American child analyst Margaret Mahler, but in the sense of a pathological symbiosis which cannot be concluded because of the mother’s parasitical needs.
