Pontalis - Psicanálise

8/11/2019 Pontalis - Psicanlise

1/8

J.-B. Pontalis, a thinker of psychoanalysis

Edmundo G omez Mango [email protected]

Seven years before J.-B. Pontalis died, his close friends arranged to pay hima tribute and got together to commemorate the man and his work. For aweek during September 2006, a conference was held and many psychoana-lysts, poets, novelists, essayists, critics and art historians took part. It washosted at the Cerisys International Cultural Centre ( Centre Culturel Inter-national de Cerisy ) in Normandy, a prestigious venue in the French culturaltradition. The conference proceedings were published under the title Le

royaume interm

ediaire [The In-Between Realm ] (Pontalis, 2007), a Freudianphrase 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 reallife which is created by the transference. J.-B. Pontalis never renounced theintimate experience of psychoanalysis. He never ceased to inhabit andexplore that space of the intermediate, going through other forms of between or in-between, terms that often recurred under his pen. Entre ler

^

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, thecomfortable at-home; he wished to head for the alien and to welcome it aswell. 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 afixed and completed corpus; he preferred open-endedness, incompletion(this is the title of the last issue of the Nouvelle revue de psychanalyse ). Thosewho knew him as an analyst or a supervisor, as a writer, a publisher or as afriend, but also his readers, could all sense that he couched the rare presenceof a thinker. He was a researcher, arousing the curiosity of his interlocutors,inviting all to both the pleasure and the discipline of intellectual work. TheCerisy gathering was a manifestation of the secular aura of freedom, clarityand cordiality which radiated from him and from his thought as well as fromhis writings. In his presence, we never felt like disciples idolizing a master: byrallying round him, by reading our papers, by listening to and discussing thepapers of others, we were at work with his thought and with our own. In hiscompany, one did not experience Freuds theory as a dogma and psycho-analysis seemed unable to pursue its research without keeping the freedomof 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


2/8

implied being in motion. Throughout his life, he was an analyst, a writer, apublisher.

The power of his influence was considerable: it manifested itself veryearly 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 memberof the editorial board. These articles were collected later in Apres 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 JeanLaplanche. His intellectual outreach went on with the founding of the Nou-velle Revue de Psychanalyse (1970 94). This journal (50 issues over a 25-yearperiod) brought about a genuine makeover of the very notion of psycho-analysis, inscribing the latter within cultural life. It became open toresearchers 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 openorientation elicited the inclusion of a large number of English-speakingauthors (Christopher Bollas, Bertrand Lewin, Adam Phillips, Harold Sear-les, D. W. Winnicott, among others). The topics tackled in the journalsissues 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), Perdrede 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 andwhich appealed to a very broad readership. His work as a publisher con-stantly renewed itself: he created Connaissance de linconscient [Knowledgeof the Unconscious ] (1966) in the context of the Gallimard publishinghouse, a collection which became one of the most prestigious psychoanalyticseries in France. It introduced whole new sections of Freuds correspon-dence and keenly contributed to the translation of Freuds work intoFrench. It made a point of publishing French translations of significantEnglish-speaking authors (D. W. Winnicott, B. Bettelheim, H. Searles, R.

Stoller, M. Kahn) along with the most noteworthy contemporary Frenchauthors. The series also improved the visibility of figures that had first beenforgotten in the psychoanalytic tradition, such as Georg Groddeck or LouAndreas Salom e. Pontalis founded the celebrated journal Le temps de lar

eflexion [The Time of Reflection ] (1980 89) to which prominent figures of French and European culture contributed (Jean Starobinski, Jean-PierreVernant, Jean Clair, Claude Lefort). In later years, still in the context of Gallimard, he created Lun et lautre [One and the Other ], a literary serieswhich 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 betweenwhat pertains to psychoanalysis per se and what relates to literary produc-tion. Such was his originality: allying the power of a critical thoughtinspired by Freuds work with the unmistakably recognizable style of a man

2 E. Gomez Mango

Int J Psychoanal (2014) Copyright 2014 Institute of Psychoanalysis


3/8

of letters. He was awarded the Mary S. Sigourney prize in 2001 and theGrand Prix de litt

erature de lAcad

emie franc aise [French Academy Prize inLiterature] for his work as a whole (Pontalis, 2011).

I would like to return to The Language of Psychoanalysis , the significantbook Pontalis devised in collaboration with Jean Laplanche and which wasan immense success straight away, remaining, to this day, an excellent intro-duction to Freuds thought. Philosophy graduates who were first closelyaffiliated with Jacques Lacan and were later among the founding membersof the French Psychoanalytic Association ( Association psychanalytique deFrance [APF], 1964), both authors spent almost ten years putting togetherwhat can be seen as the true return to Freud of French psychoanalysis.Under the direction of Professor Daniel Lagache, they vitally contributed tothe 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 forresearchers in psychoanalysis and the human sciences in general that con-ceiving of the inaugural impact of this publication requires some effort. Itsextraordinary richness first stems from the fact that it is not a dictionary ora mere review of terms: it is, as pointed out by the authors themselves, areflection, ranging from the simplest to the most complex, on the whole setof concepts which was gradually developed by Freud and by others in hiswake, in order to account for the discoveries of psychoanalysis (Laplancheand Pontalis, 1973[1967], p. xi). 2 Each commentary succeeds in grasping aFreudian notion not only at the moment of its inception within Freuds cor-

pus but also following its evolution, its development throughout the wholeoeuvre . Both authors drew the outlines of several fundamental conceptswhile simultaneously insisting on the importance of the relation betweeneach and every one of them. For example, they foregrounded the specificityof the drive in relation to the instinct, an opposition which is not explic-itly spelled out in the Freudian corpus; the distinction between the anaclitictype of object-choice and the narcissistic type of object-choice and whatunderlies them constitutively, namely the leaning of the sexual drive onself-preservation functioning; they highlighted such Freudian notions asapr es-coup or afterwardsness a decisive contribution to the understanding

of psychic temporality and causality. This rendition of Freuds thought thusfeatures the sharpest and most contentious edges of the latter, continuouslyputting readers to work. The Language of Psychoanalysis insists on theoften contradictory and unfinished aspects of Freuds theorization, whilespecifying and delineating the fundamental underpinnings of its construc-tion. It is at once a structural and historical account of Freuds thoughtand a genuine interpretation of its deep signification. It remains, even tothis day, an incentive to embark on psychoanalytic research: by elucidatingthe underpinnings of its discovery, it strives to ensure the contemporaryoutreach 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)


4/8

Many years later, J.-B. Pontalis reassessed the meaning of his work inthis 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 reality that is the important fact which somany current theorizations overlook.

(Janin, 1997, pp. 16 18) 3

He pointed out that texts as mesmerizing as A disturbance of memory onthe 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 definitelythe 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 theheart of this reluctance, lies, in my view, the refusal to equate one languagewith the truth (Pontalis, 1986, p. 96).

J.-B. Pontalis did not create a new psychoanalytic theory: he unfurled theoriginality of his own thought through the continuous questioning of thefounding 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 theexchange with historians, anthropologists, contemporary art and literarycritics. Thus, at the very heart of his own intellectual experience, hereturned to a Freudian tradition without which psychoanalysis would runthe risk of ossifying: namely the tradition of accommodating the alien. Pon-taliss thought was in permanent contact with his analytic practice which hepursued until his death. The training of analysts also took up an importantpart of his activities: for years he was the most sought-after supervisor atthe 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 hisphilosophy professor in secondary school, the importance of his involve-ment with the journal Les Temps modernes . He attended Jacques Lacansseminar for a number of years and often recollected the climate of intellec-tual euphoria brought on by the words of the Master, especially duringthe early years of Lacans teaching at Sainte-Anne Hospital. He transcribedthe 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. 16 18.

4 E. Gomez Mango



5/8

Lacans thought. He was able to say No to both of these prominent intel-lectual figures. He stopped being involved with Les Temps modernes around1970 and founded his own journal. He also distanced himself from Lacanand mostly from the Lacanians: he could not bear the abuse of powerwhich 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 contributionssuch as the meaning of perception and sensoriality, the non-reduction of thehuman experience to an encounter with the other or of transference to thesole category of language, to the sway of the signifier. He was deeplyaffected 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 andalways kept the line of facts as its target. Merleau-Pontys view of theflesh of the world as eliciting an understanding of our own bodys flesh,his way of envisioning the embodiment phenomenon, his attempt to grasppsychic life without overlooking its anchoring in the body, the insistence onthe chiasm of the visible and the invisible, on the power of the sensible inwhich the dialectics of absence and presence are already at play, such aresome of the salient features in the philosophy of the author of Signes whichhad 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 thoughtcategories: ambiguity, exchange, chiasm, interlacing. 4

Pontalis granted capital importance to dreams, to the dreamwork, towhat he referred to as the dreamed dream and the dream text. He distin-guished between the dream experience, on the one hand, dreaming and, onthe other hand, the dream communicated as a message, images transformedinto words by the dream narrative which always comes apr es-coup . Freudmostly explored the recounted dream, the dream narrative; he discoveredthe 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 cannotbe deciphered. Pontalis wished to explore that obscure side of dream life,the very experience of dreaming. As an analyst, he would strive to picturewhat the dream experience (or its absence) might mean to a specific patient,before trying to decipher his or her dreams. To Pontalis, dreaming is anexploration, a trial of the maternal, the body the mother, the mythicallocus of some primal confusion where all can become entangled: the ages of life, the outside and the inside, the sensible and the intelligible, day andnight. 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.




6/8

that counters the horror, the pain of dissolution, of annihilation. Pontalisinsisted on the kind of osmosis that occurs between the mnemic trace of thevisual 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 withMerleau-Ponty: the primal form of waking perception must be sought indream-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 toitself, denying any other figurations. In some cases, the pain of existing

summons and consumes all energies, as if the power of pain became the soleenigma, the only question, requiring in-depth investigation, penetration in amad chase that ceaselessly heightens it and turns the chaser himself into theprey. Pontalis referred to such patients as the untreatable ones, as thosewho persist in unhappiness as the sole possibility of existence. For them,the most intimate core of their intimacy, the subjects innermost and mostconstitutive aspect becomes pain. Pain never lets go, it morphs into astrange form of jouissance that merges with the very experience of living. Inthe enigma of the drawing power of pain, J.-B. Pontalis detected, onceagain, 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 painon several occasions, a pain that not only relates to loss: embedded in it,Pontalis could perceive a fragment of the archaic mother, loved andhated madly, body as matrix and body as phallus, whatever persists, in thatmother, 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 infanscannot 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 aprimary, primordial yet ever present layer of the psychic experience.The non-speaking disposes of other means besides language in order toexpress 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 thatwhich remains mute should not be overlooked. The non-speaking manifestsitself most intensely in what he calls the strangeness of the transference:in the acting-in of mute passions (violence, hate, passionate love, the

6 E. Gomez Mango



7/8

stranglehold that tends to immobilize the thought of both partners in thesession). In this flesh of the transference, the infans , the non-speakingparadoxically becomes audible (Pontalis, 1990b).

In J.-B. Pontaliss view, dream thinking is a particular way of hearing inthe psychoanalytic session but it is also a modality of writing, one thatstrives to convey the experience of psychoanalysis. Pontalis refuses to defineit as a concept. It is, rather, a quality of the work of the waking mind whenthe latter becomes akin to dream thinking. It resonates, in my view, withthe work of the analyst as Freud views it, namely as a continuous intimatedialogue between fantasizing [ Phantasieren ] and metapsychological think-ing. Dream thinking borrows its volatility from the volatility of dreams; italmost ignores the fact that it is a form of thinking, maintaining a link withthe kind of sensory acuity that characterizes the infans . It is distinct fromdaydreaming which is always more or less guided by our desires. Pontalis,

the writer of the analytic experience, always strives to get closer to the latterwhile 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); autobiographywith Lamour des commencements [The Love of Beginnings ] (1989). Lenfantdes 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 conveysa sense of renewed alliance between thought and the innovative and spiritedpoetry 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 anI that writes itself without taking itself as an object, without describingitself, 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 avecles

ecrivains [Freud among Writers ] (Gomez 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 literatureand writers. Along with Freud, Pontalis acknowledged the great debt of psychoanalysis towards the Dichter , the poet in the broadest sense, often itsforerunner in the discovery of the unconscious. Literature is a frequentsource of inspiration for Freud but it is also a means of ascertainment of his theoretical and clinical claims. Whenever Freud ventures risky or daringhypotheses, he finds reassurance in their resonance or convergence with an

existing master-piece, the confirmation that his thought includes somehuman truth.

5 On autography, cf. Pontalis, 2011, p. 132.




8/8

A posthumous book, Mar

ee basse, mar

ee haute [Low Tide, High Tide ](2013), a beautiful collection of short stories, is Pontaliss final farewell. Inhis writings, J.-B. Pontalis never ceased to nurture the dialogue betweenpoetry and thought.

ReferencesGomez Mango E, Pontalis J-B (2012). Freud avec les ecrivains . Paris: Gallimard. (Connaissance de

l inconscient, Traces.)Janin C (1997). J.-B. Pontalis . Paris: PUF. (Psychanalystes d aujourd hui.)Laplanche J, Pontalis J-B (1973[1967]). The language of psychoanalysis , Nicholson-Smith D,

translator. International Psycho-Analytical Library 94 , 1 497. London: Hogarth & the Institute ofPsycho-Analysis.

Pontalis J-B (1961). Note sur la probl ematique de l inconscient chez Merleau-Ponty. Les Temps modernes 184 186, October.

Pontalis J-B (1965). Apr es Freud . Paris: Juillard (second edition, 1993).Pontalis J-B (1977). Pr esence, entre les signes, absence. In: Entre le r

^

eve et la douleur ,. Paris:Gallimard.

Pontalis J-B (1986). L amour des commencements . Paris: Gallimard.Pontalis J-B (1988). Perdre de vue . Paris: Gallimard: 105. (Connaissance de l inconscient.)Pontalis J-B (1990a). La perception onirique. In: La force d attraction , 37 41. Paris: Seuil.Pontalis J-B (1990b). L etranget e du transfert. In: La force d attraction. Paris: Seuil.Pontalis J-B (2007). Le royaume interm

ediaire . Paris: Gallimard.Pontalis J-B (2011). Avant . Paris: Gallimard.Pontalis J-B ((2012). Le Laboratoire central . Gribinski M, editor. Paris: l Olivier.

8 E. Gomez Mango


Documents

Pontalis - Psicanálise