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In his writings, Marcel?Proust was the acute observer and theorist of his own sexual life, seeking to determine its original, complex, even peculiar nature. The horror of penetration there closely resembles sadism, with highly evident links to the mother figure. The author attempts to untangle the threads of this complexity in order to show, beyond the maternal fixation that has impotence as its corollary, how the specific representation of the male and female sexes leads to a fear of annihilation that prevents the exercise of sexuality, which nevertheless finds a means of fulfilment in sublimation that extols the return to infantile sexuality.