Dr. Blum is an expert on Marcel Proust. He’s also a friend of Dr. Palombo’s.
A Meeting of Joyce and Proust
https://www.academia.edu/42992827/A_Meeting_of_Joyce_and_Proust_Petty_Recollections_of_No_Importance
Shipped a Copy of A Meeting of Joyce and Proust to Harold P. Blum, M.D.
22 Friday May 2020
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My Daily Struggles 
Dr. Blum’s paper about Proust. Is the birthday cake the equivalent of Proust’s madeleine?
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23126411/
“I interpret the famed joyous tasting of the madeleine in tea as an artfully disguised, temporally displaced, and affective reversal of life-threatening trauma.”
Compare:
In A Meeting of Joyce and Proust I write about the birthday cake:
“These memories flood back every Christmas. It was really a disturbing day in some ways — what with my parents’ arguing and my aunt attacking me — but my memories of this day are affectingly nostalgic. I have the persistent wish to relive this day as if it had some special pleasure for me. Perhaps, the ancient Roman philosopher, Seneca, offers a clue to my fond recollections: “Things that were hard to bear are sweet to remember.”
But I am leaving something out. For my thirteenth birthday my mother had purchased for me a recording of Beethoven’s violin concerto in D major, opus 61. It was a recording of Nathan Milstein soloist with the Philharmonia Orchestra, conducted by Erich Leinsdorf. I have a personal identification with the Beethoven violin concerto. It was first performed on December 23, 1806 — the date of my birth. At that age I studied violin and played in the school orchestra. Also, for Christmas that year my mother purchased for me a recording of Wagner’s opera, Götterdämmerung, my favorite Wagner opera. It’s four and-a-half hours long! I have had a life-long passion for that opera, and I still listen to it often.”
Check out my therapy session on January 22, 2019 in Psychotherapy Reflections:
“So, I’m thinking that’s definitely traumatic in a real sense. The chickenpox incident when I was seven and my thirteenth birthday weren’t really traumatic in a real sense. But the curtain rod incident was definitely traumatic. And I’m thinking that my feelings of nostalgia about my thirteenth birthday and the chicken pox incident from age 7 are screen memories for the earlier traumatic event from age two. And I’m thinking that that’s where my nostalgic feelings come in. I’m curious about the possibility that in a screen memory there can be affective reversal. So the traumatic event was painful and disturbing, a later memory screens out the memory of the earlier events but also screens out the mental pain by transforming the pain into nostalgia. And I did some research on that and I found that that can be true. For example, I was reading about aging Holocaust survivors. It’s been found that some of them actually develop nostalgic feelings about their concentration camp experience. Well, of course, there’s something going on there because the concentration camp experience was a painful experience. And I was reading about this phenomenon called “affective reversal.” The later nostalgic feelings reverse the pain of the earlier traumatic experience.”
Click to access final-final-psychotherapy-reflections-march-4-2020.pdf