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The appearance of an English translation of J. B. Pontalis' Entre le Rêve et la Douleur as Frontiers in Psychoanalysis: Between the Dream and Psychic Pain is to be welcomed. The work is lucidly introduced by M. Masud R. Khan, and the translation is excellent. Jabes in his Le Livre
de Questions (1963, p. 47) quotes Rabbi Tal as saying: 'Dieu est l'enfant de Son Nom'—(God is the son of His own name). Without accepting all the implications of Rabbinical wisdom, I think that, nevertheless, part of Pontalis' surname is expressive of both his personality and his writing; that is 'pont'—'bridge'.1 By nature and by culture, Pontalis is an extremely sensitive and subtle mediator between the more interesting current trends in psychoanalysis.
On the continent, Pontalis is generally considered to be one of the pontifices maximi of psychoanalysis: this is both because of his Cartesian clarity, and also capacity for definition and use, both clinically and theoretically, of Freudian ideas, combined with a confrontation of these concepts with current psychoanalytic thought. To the English-speaking reader, Pontalis, trained in Paris, strongly influenced by Lacan for a while, a personal friend of Sartre, and the principal editor of Freud's work in French, is mainly known for his collaboration with Laplanche on an indispensable tool for all those interested in psychoanalysis— The Language of Psychoanalysis (1973).
Frontiers of Psychoanalysis provides evidence of the originality of Pontalis' work in its consideration of historical, metapsychological and clinical problems. The book contains papers on the relationship between Freud and Charcot in Paris (p. 17), on the eminent philospher and psychologist, Me