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Some time back I tried to review Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-analysis by Lacan. It
was enormously puzzling, and I ended up largely baffled—‘it was not a book for the uninitiated, it was for devotees’, I wrote.
Pontalis's book had something of the same effect on me and I began to doubt whether I was the person to review Frontiers in Psychoanalysis. Was it worth a review? Do I know much too little about its background and so on? No, I will not be defeated—this is not a nonsense, nor am I so ignorant; but all the same Pontalis, apart from the prominent place he takes among French psychoanalysts, is so intelligent that it knocks one over backwards; moreover, he is a stylist and tremendously erudite: he must be well versed in psychoanalysis, having compiled with Laplanche The Language of Psychoanalysis, so well received as ‘a cross between a dictionary and an encyclopedia’, I learned from an advertisement on the book jacket. I struggled on, sniping at the sometimes odd English and the misuse of words like ‘to’ and ‘from’ or the use of unusual ones—‘valorisation’, ‘irrecusable’, ‘effraction’—which made me feel uneducated when I found most of them, but not all, in the Concise Oxford Dictionary.
No, it is not the translation, for some of the punctuation especially shows a mastery of sentence structure; so it must be Pontalis's own idiom that I find frustrating. The feeling that I could not get hold of anything was made worse by his great ability to grasp what others were after, especially Klein and Winnicott among psychoanalysts—he is evidently much influenced by both, but especially Winnicott. Then there is much of interest in a whole chapter about Rousseau's Confessions, in another on Merleau-Ponty, not to mention the Surrealists.
At the end of chapter 8, ‘Places and separations’, there is a paragraph which I will quote because it gives very beautifully a sense of the best in Pontalis's style:
But we, the readers of his Confessions, have neither to acquit him nor to