On the Analyst’s Identification with the Patient: the Case of J.-B. Pontalis and G. Perec

Abstract

The writer Georges Perec was in psychoanalysis with Jean-Bertrand Pontalis for four years in the early 1970s. In this essay, the author presents the exceptional interest this analyst took in this patient and the ways in which that interest manifested itself in his work, psychoanalytic and otherwise. Many correlative factors suggest that identificatory processes persisted beyond the treatment and were maintained into Pontalis’s later life. While this paper is primarily intended to provide evidence to support this view of a specific case, the author closes by reflecting that this may be a more general phenomenon and the reasons for this.

• J.-B. Pontalis
• G. Perec
• French literature
• identification
• postanalytic influence
• countertransference
• confidentiality
• Holocaust survivors
• Oulipo
• immixture