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Yes—in the broad, colloquial sense, Proust was very much perceived as unusually attached to his mother, although “mama’s boy” is a modern and somewhat reductive label.

His mother, Jeanne Weil Proust, was probably the single most important emotional relationship of his childhood. Several things contributed:

• His health made the attachment unusually intense. Proust suffered his first severe asthma attack at nine, and recurring illness kept him out of school for long periods. His mother helped oversee his education at home, which brought them into unusually close daily contact. 
• He was extremely dependent on her emotionally. The famous bedtime episode in Swann’s Way—the child Marcel desperately needing his mother’s goodnight kiss—is strongly rooted in his own childhood. The real Proust reportedly said that the thing he most feared was being separated from “Maman.” 
• His contemporaries noticed the closeness. A childhood friend, Maurice Duplay, remembered the extraordinary intimacy between Jeanne and Marcel: they joked together, exchanged literary references, and seemed to take particular delight in each other’s company. 
• She was intellectually important to him as well as emotionally important. Jeanne was highly educated and cultivated, and she encouraged his interests in literature, music, history, and art. So this wasn’t simply a sickly child being indulged by an overprotective mother; she was also his intellectual companion. 

And the attachment didn’t simply disappear when he grew up. Proust remained in his parents’ home extraordinarily late—he didn’t move out until after both parents had died. When Jeanne died in 1905, he was devastated and subsequently suffered a serious depressive episode. 

There is an interesting wrinkle, though: Jeanne wasn’t simply a permissive “helicopter mom.” She could be quite firm, and Proust’s relationship with her included tension, guilt, affection, dependence, and attempts at separation. That’s part of what makes the mother-son relationship in In Search of Lost Time much richer than the stereotype.

So if you’re asking “Would people looking at young Marcel have thought, that boy is extremely attached to his mother?”—yes, very plausibly. If you’re asking “Was he regarded by contemporaries as a childish, spoiled mama’s boy?”—that’s a more complicated claim, and I’d distinguish it from the well-documented intensity of the attachment.

Did his attachment to his mother influence his sexual dysfunctionality with women?

Yes, some biographers and psychoanalytic critics have argued for a connection, but it would be too strong to say that his attachment to his mother caused his difficulties with women. Proust’s sexuality was unusually complicated, and his relationships with women cannot be explained by a single childhood factor.

A useful distinction is between three different things:

1. His intense attachment to his mother
2. His apparent difficulty with conventional heterosexual sexuality
3. His attraction to men

The first certainly existed; the second is documented to some degree; but the relationship among them is an interpretation rather than an established causal fact.

The psychoanalytic interpretation

There is a long tradition of reading Proust through the mother-son relationship. One modern psychoanalytic study, for example, explicitly argues that Proust’s maternal fixation was connected with impotence and with a fear of sexual penetration.  Another psychoanalytic study discusses his sexuality in terms of conflicts originating in the mother-child relationship. 

The basic Freudian story would be something like:

Mother is the first and overwhelmingly important object of love → separation from her becomes extremely threatening → adult erotic relationships reproduce aspects of that attachment → sexuality becomes entangled with anxiety, dependence, jealousy, guilt, and control.

There is actually something striking in Proust’s own fiction that makes this interpretation tempting. His narrator repeatedly becomes intensely attached to women but often seems more interested in possessing, observing, worrying about, or being reassured by them than in straightforward sexual consummation. Love becomes an obsessive psychological relationship.

The Recherche is almost a laboratory for this: the narrator’s relationships with Gilberte, Odette, and especially Albertine are saturated with jealousy, surveillance, separation anxiety and the desire to possess another person’s inner life.

But there’s an important complication

Proust was not simply a heterosexual man who couldn’t have sex with women because he was too attached to his mother.

His sexual history strongly suggests that his attraction to men was genuine and substantial. William Carter’s scholarly biography, Proust in Love, documents his adolescent sexual experiences, relationships with men, attempts to suppress his homosexuality, relationships with women, and encounters with prostitutes. 

His mother herself was apparently very conscious of his sexuality and worried about it. A biography of Jeanne Proust describes her lifelong concerns about Marcel’s sexuality, health, and talent. 

So there’s an interesting possibility: his attachment to his mother may have complicated his sexuality without being the source of his homosexuality.

And there’s an even more interesting way to look at it

Proust’s problem with women may have been less “he couldn’t desire women” than what happened when desire became possible.

He could become fascinated by women. He could fall in love with them—or with versions of them. But intimacy seems to have generated enormous anxiety. The desired woman becomes something to be possessed, monitored, interpreted, and ultimately feared as a source of abandonment.

That makes the relationship with his mother particularly relevant. Jeanne was the person whose affection Marcel desperately wanted but whose absence he found almost unbearable. The famous bedtime scene in Swann’s Way is essentially a miniature of this emotional structure: desire → separation → anxiety → desperate attempt to obtain reassurance from the loved woman. His mother’s importance to his emotional life is exceptionally well established. 

So I’d put it this way:

His maternal attachment probably influenced the form his erotic relationships took—especially dependency, jealousy, fear of separation, and the need to possess the beloved—but it doesn’t adequately explain his sexual orientation or establish why he had difficulty with women.

And this is actually one of the reasons Proust is so interesting: the women in his novels can sometimes look like displaced versions of the maternal relationship, while his relationships with men reveal a quite different side of his sexuality. His fiction continually mixes the two.

Here follows the rather startling theory that Albertine is partly a disguised version of Proust’s relationship with his mother—there’s a surprisingly strong literary/psychoanalytic case for that.

Well, the fascinating thing is that the connection isn’t simply “Albertine = his mother.” It’s more that Proust seems to have transferred the emotional structure of his relationship with his mother into his relationship with Albertine.

The striking parallel

In In Search of Lost Time, Marcel’s relationship with Albertine is dominated by a peculiar cycle:

desire → fear of losing her → attempt to possess her → anxiety and surveillance → emotional exhaustion → renewed desire.

That pattern has an obvious resemblance to the famous childhood relationship with his mother.

As a child, Marcel desperately wants his mother’s goodnight kiss. The problem isn’t merely that he loves her; it’s that her withdrawal becomes almost intolerable. The child’s emotional world is organized around the question:

Will she come back? Does she still love me? Can I make her stay?

With Albertine, the same basic problem reappears in adult erotic form. Marcel doesn’t simply want Albertine sexually. He wants certainty about her—where she is, whom she sees, what she thinks, whether she loves him, whether she might leave.

And certainty is impossible.

That impossibility is what makes him obsessive.

Albertine is also strikingly maternal in certain respects

There are several moments when Albertine’s role resembles that of a caregiver or domestic companion rather than simply a sexual partner.

When Marcel has Albertine live with him in Paris, their relationship becomes extraordinarily domestic. He determines where she goes, worries about her movements, monitors her relationships, and tries to keep her physically within his sphere.

That reverses the childhood situation.

As a boy, Marcel was the dependent one:

Mother → child
mother can leave → child waits
child begs → mother returns

With Albertine, he tries to become the person who controls the separation:

Marcel → Albertine
Albertine can leave → Marcel prevents her from leaving
Marcel monitors → Albertine becomes dependent

In other words, the adult Marcel tries to master the anxiety that the child Marcel couldn’t master.

That’s one reason the Albertine episodes can feel almost claustrophobic.

And then comes the really Proustian twist

Albertine isn’t just a replacement for his mother. She becomes an object onto which Marcel projects his own anxieties about homosexuality.

Marcel is obsessed with the possibility that Albertine is attracted to women.

That is crucial.

He doesn’t merely wonder:

“Does Albertine love me?”

He wonders:

“What does Albertine desire when I’m not there?”

And because he cannot know, he investigates.

This mirrors something fundamental in Proust’s own situation. His homosexuality was something he had to conceal in a society where it was heavily stigmatized. Consequently, sexuality itself becomes something hidden, inferred, investigated, and suspected rather than transparently known.

So Marcel’s jealousy becomes almost epistemological:

How can I know what another person desires?

And Proust’s answer is essentially:

You can’t.

You can spy, interrogate, remember, reconstruct, analyze—and still never get inside another person’s consciousness.

That’s one of the deepest themes of the novel.

His mother’s death makes the connection even more interesting

Jeanne Proust died in 1905.

Albertine first appears substantially in the novel only afterward, and Proust’s writing of the Albertine material became particularly intense during the years following his mother’s death.

This doesn’t prove that Albertine was consciously modeled on Jeanne. But psychologically and artistically, the timing is extraordinary.

His mother had been the person whose presence he had feared losing above all others.

Then she died.

And subsequently Proust created one of literature’s most elaborate fictional structures around a man who cannot tolerate the possibility of losing the woman he loves.

Eventually, of course, Albertine disappears anyway.

And Marcel is forced to experience precisely what he has been trying to prevent.

There is an especially poignant detail

After Albertine leaves, Marcel’s response is not simply sexual heartbreak. It is almost mourning.

He remembers her, reconstructs her, searches his memories for her, tries to understand what she had been thinking, and gradually discovers that the Albertine he loved was partly a creation of his own mind.

That’s remarkably close to what happens with his mother after her death.

The living person becomes inaccessible.

What remains is:

memory + imagination + longing + reconstruction.

And that’s essentially Proust’s entire artistic project.

But we shouldn’t take the psychoanalytic interpretation too literally

There’s a danger here of saying:

“Proust loved his mother too much, therefore he became sexually dysfunctional.”

That’s much too simple, and modern psychology doesn’t give us a sound basis for making that causal claim.

There is stronger evidence for saying that Proust himself repeatedly represented erotic love using the emotional vocabulary of childhood attachment.

That’s a different proposition.

His great subject isn’t really “sex.” It’s attachment:

• I love you.
• Therefore I fear losing you.
• Because I fear losing you, I want to know everything about you.
• The more I investigate, the less certain I become.
• The more uncertain I become, the more I obsess.
• Eventually you disappear.
• And only then do I discover how much of the person I loved existed inside my own imagination.

That structure applies to his mother, Albertine, and numerous other relationships in the Recherche.

And it may explain something particularly interesting about Proust’s sexuality: his erotic imagination is often less interested in physical possession than in the impossible desire to possess another person’s consciousness.

That’s why his narrator can spend dozens of pages worrying about what someone did while he wasn’t present. The sexual act itself isn’t enough. He wants access to the beloved’s secret interior life.

And that is something no lover can ever completely have.

In that sense, the “mama’s boy” question actually leads directly into the central philosophical problem of Proust’s novel: the impossibility of possessing another person, and the way memory becomes the substitute for possession.

— Adam Donaldson Powell