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J. B. Pontalis, who achieved fame for his collaboration with Jean Laplanche in The Language of Psychoanalysis, now reviews with subtle irony his life's efforts to define concepts in psychoanalysis. He is a master of paradox and nuance; he is by turns witty and profound; and in the end, I wished very much to have known him in person.
It becomes gradually apparent as one reads this book that Pontalis has discovered a unique and persuasive manner of describing the experience of being an analyst, and it is well worth thinking about how he manages to win the reader's confidence that he is indeed a master clinician. Partly this is the effect of his obvious passion for psychoanalysis, his equally obvious and genuine concern for the welfare of his patients, and his relentless skepticism about the reductive simplification of barren “concepts.” For example: “An interpretation that comes from what I know and not from what strikes me is not an interpretation. [It is] a deafness, a blindness, brought about by knowledge” (p. 96). He is an aphorist in the grand French tradition: “Forgetting is necessary to give thickness to time” (p. 69), and “Betray nothing of yourself, as if you weren't disclosing something in concealing yourself” (p. 50).
He is an enemy of the cliché and a champion of the unique immediacy of clinical experience. And he is not ashamed to say why he reveres the work of Sigmund Freud. This volume distills the wise experience of a gifted analyst, and will richly reward careful reading throughout the psychoanalytic community.