Author: Virginia BarryPublisher: Scratch and Sniff Publishing Incorporated
ISBN: 9780912603162
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 119
Book Description
A discussion of the works of Marcel Proust as it relates to smell and emotion. Scratch and Sniff Proust Dr. Virginia Barry M.D / Psychoanalyst in Chicago, IL. skillfully combines the words of Proust-psychology-art-prose-science and medicine to reveal the link between smell and emotion. Author Dr. Barry writes: Memories elicited by smell are imbued with a kind of visceral and emotional essence that sets them apart from memories called up by words or images alone. I am transported when I bury my nose in a bunch of freshly cut basil; whereas seeing a recipe for Insalata Caprese generates a grocery list. Another parched day of drought makes me wish for rain, but the smell of the earth-the petrichor-after that first rain makes me want to dance and fills me with optimism. The memories evoked by fragrances are rarely bland or colorless; they are drenched in emotion. Although he didn't have neuroscience to illuminate why olfaction is so emotionally evocative, Marcel Proust understood the power of scent to unleash ancient, long forgotten memories that form the foundation of our emotional lives. As the title of his great work tells us, In Search of Lost Time (also translated from the French as The Remembrance of Things Past) is concerned with these memories and the stamp they place on the experience of the present. Scratch and Sniff Proust began as a wisp of a joke and has evolved into something much more-part neuroscience, part art, part psychoanalysis