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The thoughtful worker, with sufficiently long experience and short of disillusionment, will eventually seek the limits of his field or the cosmology it might contain (or both). J.-B. Pontalis seeks the boundaries, the limits, the frontiers (as his book's title proclaims) of psychoanalysis. His explicit questions are complex, best appreciated in the context of his essays. Implicit are fundamental questions with no simple answers. How does the psychic apparatus work? What are the limits of psychoanalysis? What are its tools? To what and to whom is it applicable: only to those who are analysable or does it function also on the borders of the notanalysable? Is it psychoanalysis when it is applied to subjects other than patients, such as literary ones? Obviously, he is concerned with internalization, structuralization and function.
Pontalis may or may not wish to express his version of universal laws; but he has interpreted, correctly I believe, Freud's last instinct theory (not simply as a statement about instincts and energy, but) as principles of mental function. He does not reject those principles though he seeks to modify them slightly to give aggression a more prominent place in mental life than Freud did. Aggression, the fear of death, suicide, dissolution (all products of the death instinct and beyond the pleasure principle) are more central than castration fear. Unlike many contemporary analysts, he understands and accepts more of Freud's final instinct theory than most.
During the centuries that the term psychology has been used, its definition and its scope have constantly changed while the search for the precise nature of psychological function continues unabated. Pontalis joins the search and explores its mysteries in spatial metaphors. In a host of psychoanalytic topics (impossible to classify or to place in a chronology or a hierarchy), from dream to psychic pain he postulates an essentially structural concept, for example, that the psyche is