Magazine | Granta 174: Therapy

ENGLAND — The Freud Museum. A loud merry gang of writers and friends crowded the rooms of the large London house where Dr. Freud settled and received his patients after fleeing the Nazis. The visitors swarmed among statuettes of many-breasted goddesses, drinking Champagne and eating little savory tarts. From the first floor landing, a young woman read a fabulously creepy short story about a therapist who stalks her patient, a xylophonist with OCD. The reader was Camilla Grudova, an Edinburgh-based fiction-writer.

Granta Magazine had just published its latest issue, on the theme of Therapy. My favorite piece is Paul Keegan’s account of the cat-and-mouse game between the French writer Georges Perec and his analyst Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, in which Perec — the son of Polish Jews killed in the war — deflects his analyst with a false shell of self, of apparent confidences and overly tidy dreams, which leave Pontalis feeling, as he confesses in his autobiography, a terrible hollowness: « Never had I felt such a sense of utter abandonment. Deserted, projected into a space at once desolate and rigidly monitored. »