Jean Gillibert is a French psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, poet, translator, playwright and director born in 1925.
In 1947, he attended Antonin Artaud's lecture at the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier in Paris, which had a decisive influence on his career, marked by the exploration of madness and theater. He chose to practice as a psychoanalyst to ensure his freedom of choice; he defied the prejudices of his clinical colleagues who neither understood nor accepted this dual activity; he refused positions as directors of cultural centers because he had seen Jean-Louis Barrault become bogged down in administrative bureaucracy and cultural consensus; finally, he preferred university theater to professional theater to escape all constraints and thus create freely.
Jean Gillibert rubbed shoulders with the greatest figures in theatre: his youth was steeped in encounters with Charles Dullin, Sacha and Ludmilla Pitoëff...
The Water of Memory by Jean Gillibert
"The actor had every opportunity to make his presence known; I escaped to that unpunished place of a wandering imagination."
A collection of five first-rate works, reflecting the multiple and complementary facets of the author, at once psychoanalyst, poet, translator and playwright: an analytical essay on poems by Rimbaud (Memoir), reflections on the theatre, an annotated preface and the translation of eight sonnets by Shakespeare and, finally, several poems by the author.
Written in a voluptuously rich and inspired French language, these reflections and personal texts, crossing several reading grids, suggest an atypical vision, in form as well as in content, of literature in general.