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Somewhat to his chagrin, Jean-Bertrand Pontalis was always associated in the minds of the English-speaking psychoanalytic community with two things: the analyst Jean Laplanche and their collaborative work, The Language of Psychoanalysis (1967/1973). Yet, while the glossary remains a seminal and indispensable work of Freud scholarship, it marks only the first major achievement in a rich, varied, and mostly untranslated oeuvre which has not received the attention accorded to Laplanche's.
After working closely together on the dictionary, Laplanche and Pontalis's paths diverged. Laplanche built on his work on the dictionary by pursuing a systematic, theoretical understanding of the evolution of Freud's conceptual framework and the construction of his own theory. Pontalis, by contrast, began a lifelong career in examining our penchant for making psychoanalytic concepts and constructing theories, and questioning the way we use — and abuse — them in the consulting room. Rather than producing a “theory” of psychoanalytic theory, Pontalis's work continually reshaped the connection between psychoanalysis and language, weaving in the visual language of dreams and drawing our attention to what is silent, invisible, hidden, or cut off in the psychoanalytic concept.
In France, Pontalis garnered an equal reputation as a psychoanalytic thinker and as a literary figure who freely mixed psychoanalytic theory, fiction, philosophy, and cultural theory. Unlike his erstwhile twin, Laplanche, or other international French figures like André Green, Pontalis did not devote his career to building an integrated theoretical system. To the contrary, in the Francophone world, Pontalis is known precisely for complicating the conceptual clarity that makes The Language of Psychoanalysis a classic work in Freud scholarship. Far from elucidating a clear theoretical position, Pontalis's work frets about — and at times rails against — concepts, theories, and the unbearable necessity of theoretical constr