This article considers Georges Perec’s La Boutique obscure as a literary experiment in dream writing, by putting it in dialogue with French Freudianism, notably the clinical papers of J.-B. Pontalis, Perec’s long-time psychoanalyst. Pontalis describes a patient type, the "dream maker,” who provokes an extreme case of counter-transference and requires new methods in dream therapy. Pontalis, like...
A psychical researcher among Marcel Proust’s contemporaries called belief in the paranormal “the Dreyfus case of science.” References to spirit-life abound in Proust’s fiction, but critics have resisted readings that attend seriously to the numerous references in À la recherche du temps perdu to reincarnation, spirit-possession, and, especially, mediumship. The paper reads them through the lens...