Love of Beginnings

Pontalis writes an autobiographical meditation that traces the making of a psychoanalyst through memory, reading and the pull of language. He moves between childhood scenes, his years as a lycee student of Sartre in 1941, and his later work with Lacan from 1954, treating each as material to be worked rather than as settled biography. The book turns on what he names his love and hatred of words, the medium in which an analyst listens and the thing that most often fails him.

For a clinician, the interest lies in how Pontalis renders the formation of a vocation from the inside: the doubts, the borrowed voices, the slow separation from the teachers who marked him. He treats memory as fragmentary and unreliable, arriving in images and objects rather than in dates and sequence. The book reads less as a case history than as an account, assembled from those fragments, of how one person came to the analytic vocation and stayed with it.