Marcel Proust and Paul Sollier: the involuntary memory connection

In December 1905, eight years before he published the first volume of“In Search of LostTime”,Marcel Proust entered a sanatorium to follow a six-week treatment for “neurasthenia” under the care of Dr Paul Sollier who, along with Babinski, was considered the cleverest pupil of Charcot. Following Charcot’s wish, Sollier had studied memory in depth,and he used this knowledge to provoke emotional surges of involuntary memories in his patients. Proust’s novel contains over 1200 allusions to memory, with a specific emphasis on involuntary memory, which was largely inspired by Sollier’s theories. Beyond that, Sollier highlighted several other concepts which make him a major precursor of modern cognitive neurology: memory stabilisation requires specific conditions, learning is based on cellular changes and plasticity, memory is a universal phenomenon of the nervous system, memory organisation centres differ from perception centres, memory organisation is controlled by the frontal lobe, and neurophysiological mechanisms explain the difference between perception and memory.The rediscovery of Sollier’s extraordinary work on memory should rehabilitate a forgotten, atypical neurologist whose critical interest in psychology may, in retrospect, make him one of the first modern neuro-psychologists.