Windows

Windows gathers short prose entries, each fixed to a single word or phrase, into something between a memoir, a diary, and an analyst's notebook. Pontalis takes as his subject the private vocabularies that form between analyst and patient, treating his own idiom as evidence of what he values and what he avoids. He begins from a lifelong attachment to the figure of the window and follows language as it carries both self-knowledge and self-deception, showing how the words a person reaches for, or refuses, assemble a life-story that hides as much as it discloses.

The entries move without system across sleep, dreaming, insomnia, and the small decisions of practice, including whether to lay a patient down or sit facing them. Pontalis wrote it as a personal counterpart to The Language of Psychoanalysis, the reference work he made with Laplanche in 1967.

For the clinician it offers a sustained attention to the analyst's own words, and to the way idiom in the consulting room conceals and reveals.