Infans Scriptor

The man was crying, but he didn't know why. The tears were streaming down his face; he was astonished because it was something new. A few instants before, he had spoken about the death of his sick mother: he was 10 years old at the time; now he was 60. No sooner had she died than he was sent away to boarding school at the start of the following school year; he hardly cried at all and never spoke about her again. Now, a long time later, he was looking back over things, at a time when marital conflicts were making him consider a separation that he did not want. It was only now that he saw himself as having been abandoned by his mother and surprised himself as he came to an understanding of his choice of a love partner. His wife was older than him: might she be the “substitute” for his absent mother? It is possible that, in the end, this was the basis of their relationship? Now, he was finally speaking about it, daring to speak about it, daring to speak about it to the analyst. What followed was a freeing up of his speech. He could now express those very memories in which affects were buried. One was almost tempted to silence him.

We are indebted to Freud for having drawn our attention to the infantile scenarios that persist in adulthood and structure certain actions. But it was J.-B. Pontalis who portrayed this process in images by giving it forms that evoke figures of childhood, in particular that which he called infans scriptor. After having written many analytic texts and edited numerous French or foreign works, he published a volume (L'amour des commencements, 1986) that was written as a story in which his intellectual development was evoked in the light of certain aspects of his life: the book concluded with this Latin expression emphasising the emergence of words that originated from the silence of the infans.

Back to the analysis: Transferences act with insistence. They place the analyst in the position of a recipient of words and of a forwarding agent when the w