Person
Jean-Bertrand Pontalis
French psychoanalyst, philosopher and writer. Analysed by Lacan, he left him with Jean Laplanche and others to join the Association Psychanalytique de France, and with Laplanche wrote the Vocabulaire de la psychanalyse (1967). He founded the Nouvelle Revue de Psychanalyse and edited the Gallimard series Connaissance de l'inconscient.
Ideas
- 1964 developed Primal fantasy
Pontalis wrote the 1964 essay with Laplanche. It treats Freud's primal fantasies as fantasies of origins and as the structure within which the subject's own fantasy takes place.
- 1967 developed Afterwardsness
As co-author of the Vocabulaire, Pontalis shares in its entry ‘Après-coup’, which first presented Freud's Nachträglichkeit as a concept in its own right.
Influence
Conflict
- 1963 broke with Jacques Lacan
Pontalis left Lacan in the 1963 split of the Société Française de Psychanalyse, together with Laplanche, Anzieu and Widlöcher, and joined the Association Psychanalytique de France.
Affinity
- 1967 collaborated with Jean Laplanche
Schoolfellows at the Lycée Henri IV, they co-wrote the essay on primal fantasy (1964) and, over eight years of work prompted by Daniel Lagache, the Vocabulaire de la psychanalyse (1967).
Works
- 1964
Fantasy and the Origins of Sexuality
An essay by Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, first published in Les Temps modernes (no. 215, April 1964), translated into English in the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis in 1968 and issued as a book by Hachette in 1985. It starts from Freud's difficulty, in the Wolf Man case, in deciding whether the primal scene had been lived or imagined, a difficulty that led him to seek a foundation beyond both individual experience and imagination in inherited primal fantasies. The authors recover this neglected concept and read the primal fantasies (the primal scene, seduction and castration) as fantasies of origins: like myths, each stages an answer to the enigma of the origin of the subject, of sexuality, or of the difference between the sexes. They describe fantasy as a scenario with multiple entries, in which the subject is present in the scene rather than in a fixed place, and they set Freud's notion beside the Kleinian conception of unconscious phantasy. Laplanche later called the essay the historical recovery of a concept with which he no longer agreed.
- 1967
The Language of Psycho-Analysis
A dictionary of the concepts of psychoanalysis by Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, prepared over eight years at Daniel Lagache's instigation and published by the Presses universitaires de France in 1967, in Lagache's Bibliothèque de psychanalyse. Donald Nicholson-Smith's English translation, The Language of Psycho-Analysis, appeared from the Hogarth Press in 1973. Freud kept revising his theory and never fixed it in a final system, so instead of bare definitions each entry traces how a concept arose and changed in his writings, supports the account with the relevant passages, and sets out its difficulties. The alphabetical entries run from abreaction to working-through and also take in terms of later analysts, such as the mirror stage and the transitional object. Some entries brought neglected Freudian notions back into use, notably après-coup (afterwardsness) and Anlehnung, rendered as étayage (leaning-on). The book has been translated into more than twenty languages and become a standard reference.
References
- Forming new knots: Jean Laplanche, 1924–20122012Evidence for a relation
- Fantasy and the Origins of Sexuality1964Evidence for a relation
- The Language of Psycho-Analysis1967Evidence for a relation