Psychoanalysis and writing: a meeting with Jacqueline Girard-Frésard

Les lettres romandes du mardi - Loris S. Musumeci

Jacqueline Girard-Frésard is a psychoanalyst and writer. Her latest novel, And mirror, was published last year by Eclectica. It tells the story of Pierre and Madeleine, a couple with two very different personalities. He has an obsessive need to possess. As for her, despite her love for her partner, she's not ready to negotiate her freedom. To meet. 

You're a psychoanalyst and a writer. What do you see as the link between these two activities?

Certainly the pleasure of interpreting and thinking. Psychoanalysis is therapeutic work; writing is the love of words, the love of telling, the love of creating stories. The energy invested in writing relieves me, insofar as I go through a phase of total depersonalization and enter into the lives of other characters.

In this sense, is writing also therapeutic?

It's not so much the writing itself that's therapeutic, but the energy expended in practicing it. You could compare it to jogging. Only, the energy I release when I write is not physical, but psychic.

So this energy is also artistic.

Yes, my writing is based on images. It's even photographic. I see places, people, and from this content I create my story.

Do you draw your literary inspiration from your work as a psychoanalyst?

My practice of psychoanalysis leads me to reflect, interpret and delve into slips of the tongue, desires, constraints and dreams. I have to reveal all this to the patient. But this process is linked to writing. I'm not a writer on the one hand, or a psychoanalyst on the other. I am both, with a distinction between the two activities. So I make sure that my writing is not psychoanalytical, and my psychoanalysis is not literary.

In fact And mirror that you're not trying to write a psychoanalytical novel.

I write for the words that arise and the words that flow; I practice psychoanalysis for the patient here and now, with his reality and the situation he is living.

What do you mean about masculinity through the character of Pierre and femininity through the character of Marie?

I'd like to make it clear that this Pierre is not every Pierre in the world, and this Madeleine is not every Madeleine. Pierre is generous and passionate, but he needs to possess. However, this is not necessarily unique to men. Madeleine, too, has been totally enthralled by this interesting and enthusiastic individual, but when she realizes that she's becoming his object, she feels the need to distance herself from this relationship, which is becoming mortifying. She wants to be with the other, not used by the other. Here again, I wouldn't go so far as to claim that she's the archetypal woman.

Do you have any other literary projects?

My next novel will still be about love, but with a more perverse, incestuous dimension. However, I don't want the text to be too raw and psychoanalytically inclined. Unfortunately, I'll be very busy until March 2019. I actually need long periods to write. I need to cut myself off from any connection to the outside world to devote whole days to writing.

Pierre's cigar was making threads. Madeleine was curled up inside herself. They looked like an old migraine couple, drowned in their own bubble, sitting there out of habit, watching the images on the screen scroll by, fascinated like autistics by looped images. She didn't dare move or speak, the hour seemed frozen.

Write to the author : loris.musumeci@leregardlibre.com

Photo credit: © Loris S. Musumeci for Le Regard Libre