Intro to Author & Book

Voluntary memory, the memory of the intellect and the eyes, [gives] us only imprecise facsimiles of the past which no more resemble it than pictures by bad painters resemble the spring…. So we don’t believe that life is beautiful because we don’t recall it, but if we get a whiff of a long-forgotten smell we are suddenly intoxicated, and similarly we think we no longer love the dead, because we don’t remember them, but if by chance we come across an old glove we burst into tears.

-Marcel Proust, Lettre à René Blum dans L. Pierre-Quint

 

 

My name is Dr. Virginia Barry. I am a psychiatrist / psychoanalyst and the author of Scratch and Sniff Proust. This book covers wide-ranging topics from literature to neuroscience, from psychoanalysis to studies of effect and cognition -- to smell. And it also contains original artwork. My hope is that you will immerse yourself in the interactive experience of the book and learn something about the mechanism of what Marcel Proust described as the power of smell to evoke emotions that you thought were lost to you. Scratch and Sniff Proust lets you try some of the sounds that were important to the protagonist of insert of lost time. It also lets you investigate what those scents might mean to you.