J.-B.

Pontalis, a thinker of psychoanalysis

Edmundo G

omez Mango edmundo.gomez@wanadoo.fr

Seven years before J.-B. Pontalis died, his close friends arranged to pay him
a tribute and got together to commemorate the man and his work. For a
week during September 2006, a conference was held and many psychoana-
lysts, poets, novelists, essayists, critics and art historians took part. It was
hosted at the Cerisys International Cultural Centre (Centre Culturel Inter-
national de Cerisy) in Normandy, a prestigious venue in the French cultural
tradition. The conference proceedings were published under the title Le
royaume interm ediaire [The In-Between Realm] (Pontalis, 2007), a Freudian
phrase of which J.-B. Pontalis was especially fond.
The in-between realm the Freudian Zwischenreich first refers to the
very heart of the analytic experience: that space between illness and real
life which is created by the transference. J.-B. Pontalis never renounced the
intimate experience of psychoanalysis. He never ceased to inhabit and
explore that space of the intermediate, going through other forms of
between or in-between, terms that often recurred under his pen. Entre le
r^ eve et la douleur [Between Dream and Pain] is the title of one of his books.
He often dwelled in-between psychoanalysis and literature or, in the space
of art, between the hallucinatory fulfilment of the life of desire and real life,
between language and things. He was a ferryman, fostering the crossing of
borders, drawn to the edges of psychoanalysis, where the latter may con-
verge with other human sciences in a fruitful dialogue.
He hated house arrest, as he put it: he loved to travel in the direction of
terrae incognitae. He did not like to remain in the amongst-ourselves, the
comfortable at-home; he wished to head for the alien and to welcome it as
well. He was an awakener, a tireless agitator of psychoanalysis and culture.
He stated, modestly, that he had not created an oeuvre in the sense of a
fixed and completed corpus; he preferred open-endedness, incompletion
(this is the title of the last issue of the Nouvelle revue de psychanalyse). Those
who knew him as an analyst or a supervisor, as a writer, a publisher or as a
friend, but also his readers, could all sense that he couched the rare presence
of a thinker. He was a researcher, arousing the curiosity of his interlocutors,
inviting all to both the pleasure and the discipline of intellectual work. The
Cerisy gathering was a manifestation of the secular aura of freedom, clarity
and cordiality which radiated from him and from his thought as well as from
his writings. In his presence, we never felt like disciples idolizing a master: by
rallying round him, by reading our papers, by listening to and discussing the
papers of others, we were at work with his thought and with our own. In his
company, one did not experience Freuds theory as a dogma and psycho-
analysis seemed unable to pursue its research without keeping the freedom
of thought the soul and breath of psychoanalysis alive. To him, thinking
Int J Psychoanal (2014) doi: 10.1111/1745-8315.12182
Copyright 2014 Institute of Psychoanalysis
implied being in motion. Throughout his life, he was an analyst, a writer, a
publisher.
The power of his influence was considerable: it manifested itself very
early on through the publication of numerous articles in Les temps moder-
nes, a journal led by Jean-Paul Sartre and for which Pontalis was a member
of the editorial board. These articles were collected later in Apr es Freud
[After Freud] (Pontalis, 1965). He rose to prominence on the French intellec-
tual scene with the publication of The Language of Psychoanalysis (Lap-
lanche and Pontalis, 1973[1967]), a major work co-written with Jean
Laplanche. His intellectual outreach went on with the founding of the Nou-
velle Revue de Psychanalyse (197094). This journal (50 issues over a 25-year
period) brought about a genuine makeover of the very notion of psycho-
analysis, inscribing the latter within cultural life. It became open to
researchers in the human sciences who were regarded as indispensable inter-
locutors in psychoanalytic research, thus following a deeply Freudian tradi-
tion. It was separate from all institutions. Its pluralistic and open
orientation elicited the inclusion of a large number of English-speaking
authors (Christopher Bollas, Bertrand Lewin, Adam Phillips, Harold Sear-
les, D. W. Winnicott, among others). The topics tackled in the journals
issues did not consist in previously indexed ideas from traditional nosogra-
phy but, on the contrary, they aroused curiosity and unsettled thought.
Simultaneously, he published psychoanalytic books which found wide res-
onance (Entre le r^ eve et la douleur [Between Dream and Pain] (1977), Perdre
de vue [Losing Sight of] (1988), La force dattraction [The Force of Attrac-
tion] (1990) among others) and numerous collections of essays, of fiction,
works that were not easily classifiable within a specific literary genre and
which appealed to a very broad readership. His work as a publisher con-
stantly renewed itself: he created Connaissance de linconscient [Knowledge
of the Unconscious] (1966) in the context of the Gallimard publishing
house, a collection which became one of the most prestigious psychoanalytic
series in France. It introduced whole new sections of Freuds correspon-
dence and keenly contributed to the translation of Freuds work into
French. It made a point of publishing French translations of significant
English-speaking authors (D. W. Winnicott, B. Bettelheim, H. Searles, R.
Stoller, M. Kahn) along with the most noteworthy contemporary French
authors. The series also improved the visibility of figures that had first been
forgotten in the psychoanalytic tradition, such as Georg Groddeck or Lou
Andreas Salome. Pontalis founded the celebrated journal Le temps de la
r eflexion [The Time of Reflection] (198089) to which prominent figures of
French and European culture contributed (Jean Starobinski, Jean-Pierre
Vernant, Jean Clair, Claude Lefort). In later years, still in the context of
Gallimard, he created Lun et lautre [One and the Other], a literary series
which appealed to a wide audience with considerable success.
Such a vast, rich and wide-ranging corpus of thought cannot be summa-
rized. Besides, Pontalis was not too keen on overly differentiating between
what pertains to psychoanalysis per se and what relates to literary produc-
tion. Such was his originality: allying the power of a critical thought
inspired by Freuds work with the unmistakably recognizable style of a man
2 E. G

omez Mango
Int J Psychoanal (2014) Copyright 2014 Institute of Psychoanalysis
of letters. He was awarded the Mary S. Sigourney prize in 2001 and the
Grand Prix de litt erature de lAcad emie franc aise [French Academy Prize in
Literature] for his work as a whole (Pontalis, 2011).
I would like to return to The Language of Psychoanalysis, the significant
book Pontalis devised in collaboration with Jean Laplanche and which was
an immense success straight away, remaining, to this day, an excellent intro-
duction to Freuds thought. Philosophy graduates who were first closely
affiliated with Jacques Lacan and were later among the founding members
of the French Psychoanalytic Association (Association psychanalytique de
France [APF], 1964), both authors spent almost ten years putting together
what can be seen as the true return to Freud of French psychoanalysis.
Under the direction of Professor Daniel Lagache, they vitally contributed to
the updating and the clarification of the founding work of psychoanalysis,
not only in France, but also worldwide. The Vocabu,
1
as its authors
informally called it, has become, with time, such a customary tool for
researchers in psychoanalysis and the human sciences in general that con-
ceiving of the inaugural impact of this publication requires some effort. Its
extraordinary richness first stems from the fact that it is not a dictionary or
a mere review of terms: it is, as pointed out by the authors themselves, a
reflection, ranging from the simplest to the most complex, on the whole set
of concepts which was gradually developed by Freud and by others in his
wake, in order to account for the discoveries of psychoanalysis (Laplanche
and Pontalis, 1973[1967], p. xi).
2
Each commentary succeeds in grasping a
Freudian notion not only at the moment of its inception within Freuds cor-
pus but also following its evolution, its development throughout the whole
oeuvre. Both authors drew the outlines of several fundamental concepts
while simultaneously insisting on the importance of the relation between
each and every one of them. For example, they foregrounded the specificity
of the drive in relation to the instinct, an opposition which is not explic-
itly spelled out in the Freudian corpus; the distinction between the anaclitic
type of object-choice and the narcissistic type of object-choice and what
underlies them constitutively, namely the leaning of the sexual drive on
self-preservation functioning; they highlighted such Freudian notions as
apr es-coup or afterwardsness a decisive contribution to the understanding
of psychic temporality and causality. This rendition of Freuds thought thus
features the sharpest and most contentious edges of the latter, continuously
putting readers to work. The Language of Psychoanalysis insists on the
often contradictory and unfinished aspects of Freuds theorization, while
specifying and delineating the fundamental underpinnings of its construc-
tion. It is at once a structural and historical account of Freuds thought
and a genuine interpretation of its deep signification. It remains, even to
this day, an incentive to embark on psychoanalytic research: by elucidating
the underpinnings of its discovery, it strives to ensure the contemporary
outreach of its ideas.
1
The French title is Le vocabulaire de la psychanalyse [The Vocabulary of Psychoanalysis].
2
Translation modified.
J.-B. Pontalis, a thinker of psychoanalysis 3
Copyright 2014 Institute of Psychoanalysis Int J Psychoanal (2014)
Many years later, J.-B. Pontalis reassessed the meaning of his work in
this book. He writes:
Freuds theory does not form a unifiable whole, not only because it is in a state of
constant development, undergoing amendments, but because it is made up of dis-
placements, contradictions, returns of the repressed; also because it refers to a plu-
rality of models that cannot be harmonized together, resorting to all kinds of
metaphors, none of which could claim exclusive validity and above all allege to rep-
resent the ultimate substratum of psychic realitythat is the important fact which so
many current theorizations overlook.
(Janin, 1997, pp. 1618)
3
He pointed out that texts as mesmerizing as A disturbance of memory on
the Acropolis, The theme of the three caskets, On transience or The uncanny
were hardly mentioned in The Language of Psychoanalysis. One of the cru-
cial marks which his journey through Freuds theory left in him is definitely
the following: I hold as suspicious any thought which, in its own defence,
has an answer to everything and keeps its own uncertainty at bay. At the
heart of this reluctance, lies, in my view, the refusal to equate one language
with the truth (Pontalis, 1986, p. 96).
J.-B. Pontalis did not create a new psychoanalytic theory: he unfurled the
originality of his own thought through the continuous questioning of the
founding work and through a dialogue with the main post-Freudian think-
ers. He enriched his view of psychoanalysis through assiduous exposure to
major works in the human sciences. He constantly promoted a kind of psy-
choanalytic thought that would be open to modernity and be fuelled by the
exchange with historians, anthropologists, contemporary art and literary
critics. Thus, at the very heart of his own intellectual experience, he
returned to a Freudian tradition without which psychoanalysis would run
the risk of ossifying: namely the tradition of accommodating the alien. Pon-
taliss thought was in permanent contact with his analytic practice which he
pursued until his death. The training of analysts also took up an important
part of his activities: for years he was the most sought-after supervisor at
the training institute of the APF.
He acknowledged that three personal, major and decisive encounters pre-
sided over the development of his thought: Jean-Paul Sartre, Jacques Lacan,
Maurice Merleau-Ponty. On several occasions, he mentioned the signifi-
cance that Sartre had for him, his dazzlement when he met Sartre as his
philosophy professor in secondary school, the importance of his involve-
ment with the journal Les Temps modernes. He attended Jacques Lacans
seminar for a number of years and often recollected the climate of intellec-
tual euphoria brought on by the words of the Master, especially during
the early years of Lacans teaching at Sainte-Anne Hospital. He transcribed
the first seminars which were published in the Bulletin de psychologie (1956
60) and remain among the most accessible texts for an understanding of
3
J.-B. Pontaliss lecture at the Paris Psychoanalytic Society (SPP) on 21 June 1994, quoted in Janin,
1997, pp. 1618.
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Int J Psychoanal (2014) Copyright 2014 Institute of Psychoanalysis
Lacans thought. He was able to say No to both of these prominent intel-
lectual figures. He stopped being involved with Les Temps modernes around
1970 and founded his own journal. He also distanced himself from Lacan
and mostly from the Lacanians: he could not bear the abuse of power
which their technique and their practice imposed just as he could not toler-
ate the imperative to endorse a unique line of thinking and dogmatic Laca-
nese which sought to prevail ubiquitously.
Merleau-Pontys influence was certainly more lasting and more signifi-
cant, especially in terms of some of the phenomenologists contributions
such as the meaning of perception and sensoriality, the non-reduction of the
human experience to an encounter with the other or of transference to the
sole category of language, to the sway of the signifier. He was deeply
affected by the philosophers theorizing style, in keeping with the philoso-
phers writing style: in Merleau-Ponty, Pontalis could recognize a personal,
embodied voice that remained outside the ascendancy of a system and
always kept the line of facts as its target. Merleau-Pontys view of the
flesh of the world as eliciting an understanding of our own bodys flesh,
his way of envisioning the embodiment phenomenon, his attempt to grasp
psychic life without overlooking its anchoring in the body, the insistence on
the chiasm of the visible and the invisible, on the power of the sensible in
which the dialectics of absence and presence are already at play, such are
some of the salient features in the philosophy of the author of Signes which
had a lasting influence on J.-B. Pontaliss thought and writing. Over Sar-
tres peremptory dichotomies (in-itself/for-itself, real/imaginary, active/pas-
sive), Pontalis preferred Merleau-Pontys more subtle and nuanced thought
categories: ambiguity, exchange, chiasm, interlacing.
4
Pontalis granted capital importance to dreams, to the dreamwork, to
what he referred to as the dreamed dream and the dream text. He distin-
guished between the dream experience, on the one hand, dreaming and, on
the other hand, the dream communicated as a message, images transformed
into words by the dream narrative which always comes apr es-coup. Freud
mostly explored the recounted dream, the dream narrative; he discovered
the basic mechanisms of the dreamwork and upheld dreams as a model of
unconscious formations. But Freud spent less time investigating the very
experience of the dream, the activity of dreaming. He posited the navel of
the dream as the source by which the dream is sustained and which cannot
be deciphered. Pontalis wished to explore that obscure side of dream life,
the very experience of dreaming. As an analyst, he would strive to picture
what the dream experience (or its absence) might mean to a specific patient,
before trying to decipher his or her dreams. To Pontalis, dreaming is an
exploration, a trial of the maternal, the body the mother, the mythical
locus of some primal confusion where all can become entangled: the ages of
life, the outside and the inside, the sensible and the intelligible, day and
night. A strange passivity can become activity in its midst, dreaming drives
us to the edge of transformations, towards the coincidence of oppositions.
The presentation of dream images and figures arises from a binding impetus
4
On the subject, see J.-B. Pontalis, 1961, pp. 287ff; 1977, p. 63.
J.-B. Pontalis, a thinker of psychoanalysis 5
Copyright 2014 Institute of Psychoanalysis Int J Psychoanal (2014)
that counters the horror, the pain of dissolution, of annihilation. Pontalis
insisted on the kind of osmosis that occurs between the mnemic trace of the
visual memory and the unconscious. The visual memory draws the uncon-
scious, repressed thoughts to it with exceptional force. In Pontaliss view,
dream-related perception is mostly visual: a very particular kind of visual,
one that can never be observed or really seen. Pontalis thus converges with
Merleau-Ponty: the primal form of waking perception must be sought in
dream-related perception (Pontalis, 1990a, pp. 3741, 1990b).
The other topic endowed with pivotal importance in Pontaliss metapsy-
chological and clinical reflection is psychic pain. Pontalis tackles all its vari-
ous forms but the one he is most drawn to is the pain of existing (Lacan).
The latter manifests itself insidiously but in a persistent and relentless way,
like the endless repetition of a musical motif that recurs almost identical to
itself, denying any other figurations. In some cases, the pain of existing
summons and consumes all energies, as if the power of pain became the sole
enigma, the only question, requiring in-depth investigation, penetration in a
mad chase that ceaselessly heightens it and turns the chaser himself into the
prey. Pontalis referred to such patients as the untreatable ones, as those
who persist in unhappiness as the sole possibility of existence. For them,
the most intimate core of their intimacy, the subjects innermost and most
constitutive aspect becomes pain. Pain never lets go, it morphs into a
strange form of jouissance that merges with the very experience of living. In
the enigma of the drawing power of pain, J.-B. Pontalis detected, once
again, an expression of that indestructible attachment indestructible
because constitutive of the psyche to some silent maternal presence, bur-
ied in the innermost substratum of the self. He examined that secret pain
on several occasions, a pain that not only relates to loss: embedded in it,
Pontalis could perceive a fragment of the archaic mother, loved and
hated madly, body as matrix and body as phallus, whatever persists, in that
mother, as her intimate unknown, some inaccessible, something unwin-
nable rather than lost, something that cannot be renounced (Pontalis,
1988, p. 105).
I would like to foreground two insistent motifs in J.-B. Pontaliss psycho-
analytic thought: the infans and dream thinking [pens ee r^ evante]. The
infans, the child without language, does not coincide, in its theorization,
with a chronological state in the evolution of human beings. The infans
cannot be reduced to the babbling baby. It could be said to be a mode of
existence of the psyche, one that does not disappear, persisting like a
primary, primordial yet ever present layer of the psychic experience.
The non-speaking disposes of other means besides language in order to
express itself. By stressing his view of the infans, Pontalis rejects the idea of
language as everything which comes from Lacan. The psychoanalytic expe-
rience cannot be reduced to the mere dynamics of signifiers. The metaphori-
cal injunction that Pontalis directs at the analyst i.e. let the infans speak
implies that the clinical importance of that which does not speak, of that
which remains mute should not be overlooked. The non-speaking manifests
itself most intensely in what he calls the strangeness of the transference:
in the acting-in of mute passions (violence, hate, passionate love, the
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Int J Psychoanal (2014) Copyright 2014 Institute of Psychoanalysis
stranglehold that tends to immobilize the thought of both partners in the
session). In this flesh of the transference, the infans, the non-speaking
paradoxically becomes audible (Pontalis, 1990b).
In J.-B. Pontaliss view, dream thinking is a particular way of hearing in
the psychoanalytic session but it is also a modality of writing, one that
strives to convey the experience of psychoanalysis. Pontalis refuses to define
it as a concept. It is, rather, a quality of the work of the waking mind when
the latter becomes akin to dream thinking. It resonates, in my view, with
the work of the analyst as Freud views it, namely as a continuous intimate
dialogue between fantasizing [Phantasieren] and metapsychological think-
ing. Dream thinking borrows its volatility from the volatility of dreams; it
almost ignores the fact that it is a form of thinking, maintaining a link with
the kind of sensory acuity that characterizes the infans. It is distinct from
daydreaming which is always more or less guided by our desires. Pontalis,
the writer of the analytic experience, always strives to get closer to the latter
while bearing in mind that it is beyond reach.
J.-B. Pontalis explored various forms of literary writing: fiction with Loin
[Far] (1980}, Un homme dispara^t [A Man Disappears] (1996); autobiography
with Lamour des commencements [The Love of Beginnings] (1989). Lenfant
des Limbes [The Child of Limbo] (1998) and Fen^ etres [Windows] (2000) intro-
duce his last style, on a very personal, subjective and fragmentary mode,
inspired by dream thinking. The mere mention of a few titles aptly conveys
a sense of renewed alliance between thought and the innovative and spirited
poetry that underlies them: En marge des jours [On the Fringe of Days]
(2002), Travers ee des ombres [The Crossing of Shadows] (2003), Le dormeur
eveill e [The Waking Sleeper] (2004), Elles [They] (2007), En marge des nuits
[On the Fringe of Nights] (2010), Avant [Before] (2012). With such books,
Pontalis approximates what he himself defined as autography: a self-writ-
ing in which the writers I frees itself from the authors Ego, I; it is an
I that writes itself without taking itself as an object, without describing
itself, without looking at itself in the mirror (Pontalis, 2011, p. 132).
5
His last two books were published towards the end of 2012. Le Labora-
toire central [The Central Laboratory] (Pontalis, 2012), a collection of
conversations and interviews, brings to light the fact that, throughout his
life, his thought has been a form of dialogue with the other. In Freud avec
les ecrivains [Freud among Writers] (G omez Mango and Pontali, 2012),
co-written with the author of the present article, he explored this among,
the intimate relation between the founder of psychoanalysis and literature
and writers. Along with Freud, Pontalis acknowledged the great debt of
psychoanalysis towards the Dichter, the poet in the broadest sense, often its
forerunner in the discovery of the unconscious. Literature is a frequent
source of inspiration for Freud but it is also a means of ascertainment of
his theoretical and clinical claims. Whenever Freud ventures risky or daring
hypotheses, he finds reassurance in their resonance or convergence with an
existing master-piece, the confirmation that his thought includes some
human truth.
5
On autography, cf. Pontalis, 2011, p. 132.
J.-B. Pontalis, a thinker of psychoanalysis 7
Copyright 2014 Institute of Psychoanalysis Int J Psychoanal (2014)
A posthumous book, Mar ee basse, mar ee haute [Low Tide, High Tide]
(2013), a beautiful collection of short stories, is Pontaliss final farewell. In
his writings, J.-B. Pontalis never ceased to nurture the dialogue between
poetry and thought.
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