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The novelist, filmmaker, and essayist Georges Perec was a master of wordplay and experimental writing. His tragic childhood finds hidden expression in works haunted by absence and loss. These themes are explored in the following two papers: “On the Analyst's Identification with the Patient: The Case of J.-B. Pontalis and G. Perec” (Schwartz 2016a) and “The Oneiric Autobiography of Georges Perec” (Schwartz 2016b).
Perec was in psychoanalysis with Jean-Bertrand Pontalis for four years in the early 1970s. Pontalis's written descriptions of his analysis with Perec (in which the patient is only thinly disguised) offer a unique window into Perec's psyche and the ways in which his life experiences informed his creative output. Taken together, Perec's own descriptions of his analysis and Pontalis's writing about the treatment also allow us to glimpse an uncommon and multilayered analytic relationship.
Drawing as well on Perec's autobiographical novel (1975) and other key Perecquian works (e.g., 1978), the first of the two papers that follow examines the relationship between this exceptional analytic couple and, in particular, the analyst's identification with the patient, touching on how this phenomenon may manifest in other analytic dyads. The second paper takes as its starting point Perec's published collection of 124 of his dreams, La Boutique Obscure (1973), which was translated into English only in 2012.