12 November 2013

Blanche Reverchon-Jouve and Pierre Jean Jouve: Cimetière du Montparnasse #3

'BLANCHE REVERCHON-JOUVE
1879 – 1974

PIERRE JEAN JOUVE
1887 – 1976'

In 1923 Blanche Reverchon, educated in Philosophy and Medicine, translated Freud's Trois Essais sur la Théorie de la sexualité from the original German. She met Freud four years later and he persuaded her to become a psychoanalyst. She had married Pierre Jean Jouve in 1925, and although the only other work she published was an article co-written with her husband – 'Moments d'une psychanalyse' in the Nouvelle Revue Française in 1933 – she had a considerable influence on Jouve's novels (eg. Hécate (1928) and Vagadu (1931)), and on his poems (eg. Sueur de Sang (1933) et Matière céleste (1937)).*

Jouve disowned any book of his published before 1925.

*Blanche also influenced the Belgian psychoanalyst Henri Bauchau, whose character 'la Sybille' in his first novel La Déchirure (1966) is inspired by her and dedicated to 'B.R.J.': between 1947 and 1950 she psychoanalysed him and encouraged him to write imaginative literature. Reverchon was also the inspiration behind Véronique, the therapist in Bauchau's L'Enfant bleu. Both Jouves had been Bauchau's friends, and just a few months after Bauchau died in 2012, his book Pierre et Blanche: souvenirs sur Pierre Jean Jouve et Blanche Reverchon was published.
 

My first – and very long – post on the Cimetière du Montparnasse:

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Montparnasse Cemetery / Cimetière du Montparnasse

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