Frontiers in Psychoanalysis

Pontalis gathers essays written across the 1970s into a sustained inquiry into the limits of what analysis can reach. He treats the dream not as a text to be decoded but as an object the patient clings to or loses, and he follows what happens at the edges of representation, where negation, absence and the failure of words shape the analytic encounter. Psychic pain, in his account, is what resists symbolisation, the point where the work of interpretation meets something it cannot dissolve.

Writing as both analyst and editor, Pontalis moves across clinical observation and close reading, attending to Freud's texts while questioning their settled uses. He is interested in the spaces between dreaming and waking, presence and loss, the said and the withheld.

For the practitioner, the collection offers a way of thinking about the moments when a session stalls, when meaning thins, and when what the patient brings cannot yet be spoken.