Jean-Bertrand Pontalis's quotes (sethmessenger.fr - Some short news to get away from it all).

#40689
And, let's not forget, at a time when everyone's creativity is being touted, poetry is an exact science, painting a craft and literature a style!

Jean-Bertrand Pontalis
(The love of beginnings)

#40690
I refuse to admit that perversion is a form of sexuality like any other.

Jean-Bertrand Pontalis
(On the margins of the days)

#40691
What happiness, what promise of happiness in sexual difference? How lucky that women are not made like us men! Being carried away from oneself can certainly drive you mad, angry, in spite, but it also allows us to be crossed by a senseless desire, to know mad love - or wise if there is one. I pity narcissus. I feel sorry for Hermaphrodite. They do not know that the small difference makes all the difference, and that it is it that animates our bodies and, from one side to the other, our whole being.

Jean-Bertrand Pontalis
(They)

#40692
No one can deal with death. But each of us finds a way out to settle with the dead.

Jean-Bertrand Pontalis
(Crossing the shadows)

#40693
This book will have been nothing but a navigation without purpose and without a compass, only a dream walk like that aroused by the sight of a tree, a flower, a red squirrel or a frightened rabbit - in the absence of a bird angel from the sky - along a path in the heart of a forest, or when we trace his path through fields without knowing where our steps will lead us. In these pages, it was a painting, a photograph, some transient encounters, a reading sometimes, the source of daydreaming.

Jean-Bertrand Pontalis
(The Awakened Sleeper)

#40694
The book of which I write the first lines here, I would like it to become something like a memory - therefore a fiction - dreamy, that it is a crossing of images, memories, moments, that it resembles the reverie to which the awake sleeper abandons himself, before the excess of clarity puts an end to it. It will be time then to face the day.

Jean-Bertrand Pontalis
(The Awakened Sleeper)

#40695
The most horrible thing about old age is that women are no longer interested in you when they are still of interest to you.

Jean-Bertrand Pontalis
(They)

#40696
The silent child I have long been, the wise, slightly withdrawn child, it was said, who will later be willing to think himself misunderstood, unloved, has not met on his way someone with whom to share his secrets and who would have been able to deliver him: secrets ignored by himself.

Jean-Bertrand Pontalis
(The Awakened Sleeper)

#40697
We have forgotten somewhat today, where it is appropriate to celebrate the desire ("do not give in on his desire", said Lacan who actually did not give in), the importance that Freud attaches to the idea of renunciation. Give up getting everything immediately, agree to cease being His Majesty the Baby, renounce conquering and possessing the mother, suppress father and brothers, recognize our finitude, admit that we are not immortal and that we are neither the center of the world nor the center of ourselves, discover at our expense the limits of our thought... The list is long and we do not like to see in our life a succession of renunciations. Yet this is the condition for this life to invent and invent itself, to be always in motion instead of remaining forever fixed to its first expectations, to its first objects of love and hatred.

Jean-Bertrand Pontalis
(One day, crime)

#40698
Would our changing moods also be subject to the influence of the moon? I did not dislike being a lunatic, to know the tiny pleasures offered to me by the low tide to experience a few hours later the capital pleasures that the high tide gives me. Life is moving away, but it's coming back.

Jean-Bertrand Pontalis
(Low tide high tide)

#40699
Two women in a café talk about a mutual friend. "How did you find it? - Not good at all. - Poor girl! "What do you want, she can't handle her grief." Grief, the death of the man this woman loved, the object of good or bad management! Manage your budget, manage your time, manage your energy, manage your anxiety and even, a big deal! manage your passions... Here the commercial vocabulary gains what is in us the most intimate, the most obscure. I am ashamed for these two women who do not know that one can be mad with pain and who "manage" their evening aperitif with small sips.

Jean-Bertrand Pontalis
(Windows)

#40702
Some of my days are so fragmented, make me play such varied roles, perhaps incompatible, just as it happens in these dreams that make us travel different places, and parade faces and characters with no apparent connection to leave a painful impression of dispersion.

Jean-Bertrand Pontalis
(On the margins of the nights)

#40703
1943: a year of the darkest and yet this narrow room without heating, without running water, with for all furniture a bed, a table and a chair, but where the sun penetrated and from where, at night, I saw the moon illuminate the city subject to curfew, yes, this room where, back from the high school Henri-IV, I toiled on my dissertations and my Latin versions , will forever remain the one where, in the solitude that was mine at the time, I was not the happiest (I was far from being), but perhaps the closest to myself, in this strange covenant that has never ceased to keep me company of diffuse melancholy and appetite for life.

Jean-Bertrand Pontalis
(Monomotapa's Dream)

#40704
Who is the true friend? He who protects us from the torments of love, keeps us away from hateful fury, makes death recede. (p. 162)

Jean-Bertrand Pontalis
(Monomotapa's Dream)

#40705
As long as there are books, no one will ever have the last word. [Excipit]

Jean-Bertrand Pontalis
(The love of beginnings)

#40706
The dream makes visible the invisible, makes see from all else, the forgotten. The great "laws" of the unconscious were discovered by the microscopic analysis of the dream. The dream: this telescope of our nights.

Jean-Bertrand Pontalis
(Windows)

#40707
The encounter with beauty is where one does not expect it, at the corner of a street (a small statue as forgotten there), on the height of a hill (see these three cypresses), in a village square surrounded by arcades, and not only in these consecrated places that are museums and churches

Jean-Bertrand Pontalis
(Monomotapa's Dream)

#40708
The people exist as a people only when all its components together no longer recognize themselves in those to whom it has entrusted - how else can it be done? - the care to represent it; then he protests, he manifests;

Jean-Bertrand Pontalis
(Windows)

#40709
What happens when two beings can no longer happen to each other?

Jean-Bertrand Pontalis
(Low tide high tide)

#40710
We do not aspire to eternity, if not to the one of the moment. We do not wish to be immortal, but we have the capacity to be timeless as long as all ages of life remain present in us and we refuse to let ourselves go—I renew a wish made throughout this book by doubting that it has the slightest chance of being granted— to cut out time. As is often the case, it is a child who asks the simple question - and yet it causes me a slight vertigo: "Will today be yesterday, tomorrow?"

Jean-Bertrand Pontalis
(Before)

#40711
A BIG CHAGRIN An old-year word. I think I have never heard him come out of the mouths of my patients. Too steeped in childhood time? We didn't admit it then, his sorrow, and even we could deny it when our mother, believing we guessed us - she was wrong sometimes and we did not want to be comforted by what belonged to us - leaned towards us with care: "Oh, the great sorrow!" Who dares to talk about heartache today? Rather, to mitigate the shock, "love disappointment", when it is not, in those who believe that the words of psychoanalysis go deeper, "anxiety of separation", "work of mourning", "loss of object". If, however, I heard him once utter the word "chagrin" by a man who had just been unceremoniously driven away by his companion. An old man. Perhaps that is why he was not ashamed to say that word from childhood. When I asked him what led him to come to see me, his answer was: "I am grieving, I am in pain." I have not forgotten this "in." In prison, with his only cellmate his sorrow. His grief as an abandoned child - that we don't count on him to moan! -, his sorrow as an old man who dreads to see his life reduced like a skin of sorrow and to die alone in the world.

Jean-Bertrand Pontalis
(Windows)

#40712
The dream: a rebus, a writing in pictures.

Jean-Bertrand Pontalis
(Windows)

#40713
Every year spent in high school as a student, I had a "best friend", the one who was taken home and who took you home in turn, in a succession of back and forth, as if we were never to leave each other, and yet we leave the following year. [...] These one-year friendships were forged and unravelled, almost on their own, as sudden and unpredictable in their birth as in their erasure.

Jean-Bertrand Pontalis
(Monomotapa's Dream)

#40714
Insomnia, this ruthless naked lucidity, is more formidable to me than a nightmare.

Jean-Bertrand Pontalis
(The love of beginnings)

#40715
Where does it come from that we elect certain words? That there are kind or detestable in our eyes when others say nothing to us, and that there are some so heavy that it seems urgent to deliver them?

Jean-Bertrand Pontalis
(Windows)

#40716
Forgetting is necessary to give thickness to time, to access sensitive time.

Jean-Bertrand Pontalis
(Windows)

#40717
No game, ever, has managed to get the upper hand on the pleasure that gives me the pleasure that gives me the reading of novels, new ones, provided that, one way or another, they tell a story that at the same time I dread and am eager to know the end. Deprived of reading, I would be reduced to being only who I am. I do not believe, however, that it is my "real life", nor that it allows me to live by proxy imaginary lives or to confuse mine with a novel. No, more simply, more effectively, it detaches me from my fixed points, it frees me from the distressing thought that my life could be a succession of days of which one repeats, or, worse, erases the other. She takes me where I'm not and yet, since she trains me there, it's because I'm there! Reading is my big game.

Jean-Bertrand Pontalis
(The child of limbo)

#40718
What did I know about her? What did she know about me? Almost nothing. Would my very old mother, who has become so far from the world, have got my friends to "stop living" so that she and I finally have something to share: loneliness, loneliness that is not shared?

Jean-Bertrand Pontalis
(The child of limbo)

#40719
Master Charles Vignon masters his files, he masters the language - his colleagues envy his eloquence - he works to master himself. Everything's under control. And now, at night, nothing goes wrong. The impeccable logic of the arguments derails. What seemed so solid falters, the measure gives way to excess, is the turmoil. Sea in fury, storms, earth trembles, the ground slips away, cracks, fractures. And he's doomed to walk without knowing where his steps lead him. His wristwatch is stopped. He is a lost, lost child, who continues to walk, over and over again, so as not to collapse.

Jean-Bertrand Pontalis
(Low tide high tide)

#40720
Soft tears that comfort and manage to move those who witness it and for a little would share them.

Jean-Bertrand Pontalis
(Windows)

#40721
Between the precision of the gaze, which does not go humane, and the blur that, erasing the contours, risks dissolving me, I do not want to choose. I need the alternation. I need Piero della francesca and Turner. I need geometric shapes and clouds, the mists that cover the tree tops in the fall and the clean lines, the sketches of the painters and the accomplished bodies of the sculptors. I want to stay in the undetermined place of limbo but I refuse to stay there. I like to find the right words and be able to smear. I like the vague thoughts and coherence of the speech, the silence of the accused and the eloquence of the lawyer, the time between dog and wolf and the trains that depart at the minute.

Jean-Bertrand Pontalis
(The child of limbo)

#40722
The man who sleeps is called Constantine. He's a Roman Emperor, a conqueror, a merciless warrior. His sleep seems peaceful, although he must fight the next day.

Jean-Bertrand Pontalis
(The Awakened Sleeper)

#40723
As is often the case, it is a child who asks the simple question - and yet it arouses in me a slight vertigo: "Will today be yesterday, tomorrow?".

Jean-Bertrand Pontalis
(Before)

#40724
The absence of desire is much worse than any renunciation.

Jean-Bertrand Pontalis
(On the margins of the days)

#40725
Childhood... it was the time when, most often silent, we felt, observed without the screen of knowledge and words, when all our senses were awakened, when we were sensual and visionary, where we invented the world.

Jean-Bertrand Pontalis
(Windows)

#40726
A child is bored: it is that he has ceased to believe in the powers of illusion. Suddenly he stops playing. He will not go to do the homework that the school requires. No, he's not attracted to any nose. It foreshadows the disengaged man.

Jean-Bertrand Pontalis
(Windows)

#40727
Very quickly - experience serves a purpose - I learned to distinguish attractive women from overtly seductive women. I was able to detect the flattery that hides the hatredous urge, to keep me away from the "lighters" who evade as soon as the fire they have unleashed risks taking. This must be those sirens, the deceitful ones, which led me to challenge myself to appearances and dream of women that I would find "natural". They would not need to resort to some charade. Women simply happy to be women, different from men and each different from another and all the more kind because they do not seek to be loved or to please at all costs. There are, probably.

Jean-Bertrand Pontalis
(They)

#40728
The attention I pay to spelling, to syntax - to the point that if I encounter faults on each page in a manuscript, I turn away from them immediately - I do not see it as a school survival. This concerns the correctness of the word which is also doing justice to what is named, to the body of things, to their flesh. For a little, I would equate a misspelling with the mutilation of a body, a face, a tree, a flower. For a little, I would see it as an attack, a crime, a sacrilege! Will I ever derest that, if not the same thing, words at least have no right to insult him?

Jean-Bertrand Pontalis
(Windows)

#40729
Eros, a little evil god, deceived Narcissus, making him believe that one could love oneself, while love is what carries us out of oneself.

Jean-Bertrand Pontalis
(Windows)

#40730
And now it's now. And now it's today, yesterday and tomorrow. We humans feel and believe that time passes, we pretend that it passes and, as we age, it flows too fast. But Time (with a capital letter) does not know that it passes, it is immobile, it has no age. Like all of us, I have all ages if I stop cutting time.

Jean-Bertrand Pontalis
(Before)

#40731
Still, I would have sought a subtle balance between the passing of time and the one that does not. Better than a balance: their ajointement, their very fusion, which is called moments of happiness, this permanence of the ephemeral that sometimes comes, unexpectedly, to meet us. Moments of distress as well, when the ground gives way under our feet, we lose all recourse and there is no longer for us past, present or future: we fall out of time, we fall on the spot.

Jean-Bertrand Pontalis
(The child of limbo)

#40732
The psychoanalyst is on the lookout for traces. No, not on the lookout, he does not watch them like the hunter, first because, if he hunts, it is in the dark, and especially because these traces, he discovers them where neither he nor his patient were waiting for them. He has little confidence in the memories told, evoked, as they are transformed, distorted as is any narrative. As proof, they give rise to different versions like so many translations. Freud even goes so far as to write in his text about screen memories that there are no childhood memories, but only childhood memories. This statement hurts us, as we cherish them, our memories of that time; whether they are happy or unhappy, whether they bear witness to our exploits or our shames, we believe hard to their truth. Well, no, they're fiction. Fictions like autobiography, our confessions, always more or less complacent, like our so-called intimate newspapers that do not ignore self-censorship. Fiction, what we believe to be our memory.

Jean-Bertrand Pontalis
(Before)

#40733
There are many ways to do it. Being silent is one of them.

Jean-Bertrand Pontalis
(Crossing the shadows)

#40734
Sometimes friendship, too, more than love, is a home.

Jean-Bertrand Pontalis
(The Awakened Sleeper)

#40735
I refuse to separate day and night. The night is not darkness and our days are not bright.

Jean-Bertrand Pontalis
(Crossing the shadows)

#40736
Of the one who declares in a peremptory tone: "I think...", you can be certain 1. that he doesn't think, 2. that he claims a judgment of his own when he expresses the most common opinion which he echoes without his knowledge, 3. that he is so unsuring of his existence that he puts forward Me and, for good measure, accoles him to I. There is no more boastful, more inconsistent and more conformist than this man.

Jean-Bertrand Pontalis
(Before)

#40737
The signs of dislove are more visible than those of love

Jean-Bertrand Pontalis
(They)

#40738
There are many nights when we dream of our dead. Are we the ones who invite them, these nocturnal visitors, rendered by the vision of the dream often more present, closer than they have ever been? Or do they come as intruders to annoy us to tell us the order not to let them fall into oblivion, to forbid us to believe them now locked in the silence of their graves? As accusers, they would only go to us to reproach us for having unloved, mistreated, to the point of abandoning them to death, we survivors, infidels and even to the point of making them die, we criminals.

Jean-Bertrand Pontalis
(Crossing the shadows)

#40739
Each of us has our own idea to explain and even justify that it is done as it is done.

Jean-Bertrand Pontalis
(Windows)

#40740
Dreams, dreams and daydreams from which literature, art and music are born, if we love you so much, if it is because you offer us a second life and give us for a time the illusion of freeing us from death?

Jean-Bertrand Pontalis
(The Awakened Sleeper)

#40741
To live and believe that we are free, we need several spaces.

Jean-Bertrand Pontalis
(The love of beginnings)

#40742
But sometimes I feel in subtle agreement with this universe in a reduced state, that I find it a pure aesthetic quality, without impasto of flesh, without anything too much. If there was an eroticism of appearance! Here I am seduced: we are beautiful self-regulating machines, we are functional and vigilant. Dissolved moods, soothed disturbances and turmoil of unknown origin. What a delicious rest! But this conversion is not made to last, it tires me, I want useless gestures and above all clumsy, I aspire to downtime, futile exchanges, games without rules. It is in the indeterminate that I find myself.

Jean-Bertrand Pontalis
(The love of beginnings)

#40743
Calypso, the lover. She saved Ulysses, she holds him captive in his cave, both live and love each other out of the world, out of time; to this mortal who narrowly escaped death, she proposes nothing less than immortality. Ulysses refuses to become immortal. He's a man, he knows that he doesn't want to be lost.

Jean-Bertrand Pontalis
(They)

#40744
The dream is a hallucination that doesn't drive you crazy.

Jean-Bertrand Pontalis
(Windows)

#40745
Water in Venice is sovereign. Its sky when it has just been washed by rain is of incomparable brightness: a sky of pure water. Venice, a city conquered on the sea, born of it. I remember accessing it by boat from Greece; an intense emotion seized me, accompanied by a strange pride as if the Dogana granted me a special favor by opening my way. Female Venice, Venezia always feminine. In me this fear that its thousands of visitors will come to defile it.

Jean-Bertrand Pontalis
(The Awakened Sleeper)

#40746
Why did some of our friendships, which were not superficial and had the best reasons to believe in lasting, dissolve? No annoyance, no conflict, no significant event that could explain their dissolution. No, a gradual detachment, a slow separation, an erasure that does not result from any decision. Simply, weeks have passed, months, a year, without either side having thought to wave, to take news. Something dissolved in a barely perceptible, unsensed, soft way. Smooth as we would like to disappear.

Jean-Bertrand Pontalis
(Monomotapa's Dream)

#40747
CONTRE-TRANSFERT Set of unconscious reactions of the analyst to the person of the analyzed and in particular to the transfer of the analyzed. It is in very rare passages that Freud alludes to what he has called counter-transfer. He sees it as the result of "the influence of the patient on the unconscious feelings of the doctor" and stresses that "no analyst goes further than his own internal complexes and resistances allow".

Jean-Bertrand Pontalis
(Vocabular of psychoanalysis)

#40748
Some claim to hate their childhood, Louis M., he, loved him more than anything. What he loved was not so much the child he had been as "the state of childhood".

Jean-Bertrand Pontalis
(Before)

#40749
Between them, very quickly, the current passes. This current is not electric, it would rather be the current of a stream, still close to its source, a light, joyful current, which moves at high speed and digs its way

Jean-Bertrand Pontalis
(Monomotapa's Dream)

#40750
J. slams the door when her husband, who had not concealed her affair with B., thinking he would appease her, said: "But I love you. I love you as much as the other," aggravating his case by adding "in a different way"."

Jean-Bertrand Pontalis
(Windows)

#40762
Get away, get together. Break up, look for yourself, get lost, break up again. Fleeing to breathe, suffering from absence. Their whole history lies in these alternations, these contradictory movements. There are two of them. Unity is impossible.

Jean-Bertrand Pontalis
(They)

#40763
To seek to be right is to want to be right of the other, it is to snatch him: that he is immobilized, petrified, that he remains speechless before the power of your argument, that he is prevented, like a boat boarded, from continuing his own crossing, uncertain. I don't dispute theories. I prefer to navigate their margins.

Jean-Bertrand Pontalis
(On the margins of the days)

#40764
What draws us into childhood also comes from there: it was the time when, most often silent, we felt, observed without the screen of knowledge and words, when all our senses were awakened, when we were sensual and visionary, when we invented the world.

Jean-Bertrand Pontalis
(Source inconnue)

#40765
We must cross many revenants, dissolve many ghosts, converse with many dead, give voice to many mute, starting with the infans that we are still, we must cross many shadows to finally, perhaps, find an identity that, however wavering, hold and hold us. Life is worried. Life and death are inconceivable.

Jean-Bertrand Pontalis
(Crossing the shadows)

#40766
If we understood the world, we would not be part of it, we who are unable to understand each other.

Jean-Bertrand Pontalis
(Windows)

#40767
The caducity arouses two opposite feelings: that of the disappearance of all things, inescapable and already in the process of operating, that of the miracle, of the grace of what appears. This combination of two feelings - the attraction to death and the attraction of what is present there, offered for a moment, precious: the ephemeral - arouses both melancholy and joy, a joy all the more vivid when one measures its fragility.

Jean-Bertrand Pontalis
(On the margins of the days)

#40768
The "what-good" that everyone knows at one time or another when he wonders what makes him run, get busy or write, is little, just a sign of weariness, of flexing, compared to the devastation that the death drive produces when it gives itself free rein.

Jean-Bertrand Pontalis
(On the margins of the nights)

#40769
No, definitely, a book is not made. It is written, it advances like a blind man who palpates the walls and invisible objects around him. We do not require a writer to be crazy, only disoriented. We want to meet a blind man who makes us, for a time at least, visionary.

Jean-Bertrand Pontalis
(On the margins of the nights)

#40770
To friends, if only for fear of hurting each other and jeopardizing our friendship, we are far from saying everything. There is a certain amount of reserve.

Jean-Bertrand Pontalis
(The Awakened Sleeper)

#40771
The islands today attract me: they satisfy my desire for a shoreline better than my beaches in the past. Above all, these islands whose two coasts contrast: the so-called "wild" coast, with its cliffs and piles of rocks ready to fall, and the other the "civilized", facing the continent, bordered by small dunes, soft as the skin of a woman.

Jean-Bertrand Pontalis
(The Awakened Sleeper)

#40772
Every time I spend a few days in Venice, my steps take me voluntarily or not along the Nuove Foundations from where you can see the Isola San Michele. The day I took the vaporetto that leads to this cemetery, I came across Claude Roy who was coming out. Claude died a short time later and I'm still here... Suddenly I think of my father whose comrades during the Great War fell under the shrapnel one after the other. All of them, my father said, were asking, "Who's next? When will mine come?" I am certainly not the only one asking this question. We always think death is an enemy shell that falls on us.

Jean-Bertrand Pontalis
(The Awakened Sleeper)

#40774
The eye of the mind is absent from the fairs. It goes hand in hand with loneliness, silence. It is associal as the dream, like the gesture of the painter, and like us during the time of reading, this happy parenthesis where we forget the time. This eye invites us to look elsewhere.

Jean-Bertrand Pontalis
(Before)

#40775
This world that we have not created, all we have to do is contemplate it in an attempt to unite with it in its radical strangeness

Jean-Bertrand Pontalis
(Before)

#40776
And now it's now. And now it's today, yesterday and tomorrow. We humans feel and believe that time passes, we pretend that it flows too fast. But Time (with a capital letter) does not know that it passes, it is immobile, it has no age. Like all of us, I have all ages if I stop cutting time.

Jean-Bertrand Pontalis
(Before)

#40777
The friend is not an alter ego, another myself. I want it other than me, it attracts me as being different, not too much anyway, not too "other" as can be the other sex.

Jean-Bertrand Pontalis
(Monomotapa's Dream)

#40778
In friendship, wouldn't that be what we look for and find? A way to escape the anonymous violence of the so-called outer world and the torments of the so-called internal world.

Jean-Bertrand Pontalis
(Monomotapa's Dream)

#40779
... I believed that day, that night, that men and women want only one thing: to unite. I refuse to think that this moment of grace is ephemeral, I would like it timeless. For a little I would have praised the perfect agreement, the harmony. The happy ending, I know, is just good for novels with rose water like those published by Harlequin, or like the sentimental films that little Alice loved so much. Regardless, this is how I wish to put an end to this book that I dedicate to it, singular.

Jean-Bertrand Pontalis
(They)

#40780
To conclude these words of Friedrich that Jean Clair would not disavow: "Museum rooms are now considered fairs where, by the way, new goods are judged and blamed; when they should be temples."

Jean-Bertrand Pontalis
(Before)

#40781
The present escapes us, it is always imbued with the past and the future, it is elusive, volatile, it slips through our fingers, it is hardly perceived that it is already no longer there.

Jean-Bertrand Pontalis
(Before)

#40782
Only, no doubt the translator of poetry - hence his suffering in the face of the impossibility of the task - knows that all the words of a language are mistreated by the passage, by the mutation of one language to another. The translator may well retain the meaning of the words, then reduced to signs, but he loses the sound, the resonance that were theirs in the original language. He loses the flesh of words and their souls.

Jean-Bertrand Pontalis
(Before)

#40783
It is absolutely impossible to live without oblivion. (Nietzsche, Current Considerations)

Jean-Bertrand Pontalis
(Before)

#40784
All memory is s e l e c tive.

Jean-Bertrand Pontalis
(Before)

#40785
Memories, starting with childhood memories, are always more or less reconstructed, distorted. We care for them, we value them as loved ones. Whether or not they are fiction, they are so valuable. They are proof of our uniqueness: to each one's memories, they do not share.

Jean-Bertrand Pontalis
(Before)

#40786
A debate is never just an exchange of arguments. Mine are of little weight. What does it matter to me! I will continue to believe, not to believe, but to feel that it was better before, or rather to keep, insistent in me, the question: "When was it already? the day when ...".

Jean-Bertrand Pontalis
(Before)

#40787
When the postman was not called "attendant", the teacher "teacher of schools, men and women of housekeepers "surface technicians", the Arab grocer of the corner "local ethnic trader".

Jean-Bertrand Pontalis
(Before)

#40795
I did not dislike being a lunatic, to know the tiny pleasures offered to me by the low tide to experience a few hours later the capital pleasures that the high tide gives me. life is moving away, but it is coming back.

Jean-Bertrand Pontalis
(Low tide high tide)

#40796
Perversion/sublimation. L. presents himself as an artist, he is recognized as such. The same L. calls himself a pervert. He's a painter who represents bodies. It does not disfigure them, it respects their shape, it gives them bright colors. And, at the same time, subtly, he pieces them. A body is then only an assemblage of scattered pieces, a way of bonding; the flesh does not interest him, neither that of humans nor that of objects (objects also have flesh; see the "Natures" improperly called "dead"). Besides, L. doesn't differentiate between a human body and an object. It has a big rating on the art market. Museums have bought his paintings. Sublimation? If we accept the definition of use: "derivation of impulses towards socially valued goals", etc. L. treats the woman he "fucks" - he doesn't say: with whom he makes love - and who lends himself to the game, like an aggregate of organs. The whole woman, divided, fragmented is a sexual organ. To make him enjoy, this organ, by all means, make him enjoy, always stronger, without limits. Impulse of grip close to a desire to annihilate what might be called a subject. Perversion? Here too if we accept the definition of use: "Primary of partial impulses, instead of the primacy of the genital organization", etc. Organization: submission to form, unity. The polymorphic pervert child. Is the adult who is keen to show his normality (the "normopath" according to Joyce McDougall) a polymorphic pervert ... and rather sad? Would we be sublime from the beginning? Would we all be more or less controlled perverts, more or less dampened, striving to give leave to the wild child, allowing him to manifest himself only in our dreams?

Jean-Bertrand Pontalis
(On the margins of the days)

#40797
Memory is our relief and the poorest is never quite flat.

Jean-Bertrand Pontalis
(The love of beginnings)

#40798
I want useless and above all clumsy gestures, I aspire to downtime, futile exchanges, games without rules. It is in the indeterminate that I find myself.

Jean-Bertrand Pontalis
(The love of beginnings)

#40799
I realize that the ones I am talking about here have in common that I have taught me something. Today, since the days of teachers have long since passed, I believe that it is my patients who have become my educators when they rely like me on psychoanalysis, despite everything. Other more intimate figures: my wife, my children, some friends who, day after day, awaken my taste for life when it tends to falter. (p. 134)

Jean-Bertrand Pontalis
(Monomotapa's Dream)

#40800
a thought can only be free, or rather obey only its own constraint, that it is by nature opposed to indoctrination as is, as literature should be.

Jean-Bertrand Pontalis
(One day, crime)

#40801
COMPULSION, COMPULSIONNEL In Freudian vocabulary, Zwang is used to designate a binding internal force. More often than not, it is in the context of obsessive neurosis that it is used: it implies that the subject feels compelled by this force to act, to think in such a way and fight against it.

Jean-Bertrand Pontalis
(Vocabular of psychoanalysis)

#40802
SOMATIC COMPLACENCY While it is true that the notion of somatic complacency goes far beyond the scope of hysteria and leads to the general question of the expressive power of the body and its particular ability to signify the repressed, it would be better not to confuse the different registers where the question is present from the outset.

Jean-Bertrand Pontalis
(Vocabular of psychoanalysis)

#40803
The dream is our living memory: lost time, regained time.

Jean-Bertrand Pontalis
(They)

#40804
That the verb becomes flesh is definitely the only thing that interests me. The mystery of the incarnation is not in my eyes a matter of religion but of aesthetics.

Jean-Bertrand Pontalis
(The love of beginnings)

#40805
Much embarrassed, writes Pierre Larousse, the one who, with history in hand, would like to give a definition of crime and seek on this the consensus of the peoples, and he concludes the article of his universal dictionary devoted to crime by these lines: "Modern philosophy, supported by reason and common sense will, later the time and progress of the Enlightenment, be made to be one of the greatest attacks , what to this day has been called military conquests and glory. Hence the question: what is war crimes if any war is criminal?

Jean-Bertrand Pontalis
(One day, crime)

#40814
Crossed to go to what, no destination being fixed, no "goal representation" assigned and the uncertain route deciding as it went along? If the unknown was less behind us - the elusive origin - than before? what we do not yet know, for not having experienced it, for not having found it. If what we secretly expected from an analysis, it was not that it could give birth to us - fantasy of self-generating - or reborn - illusion of a new beginning - but that it makes us able to invent ourselves?

Jean-Bertrand Pontalis
(This Time Doesn't Pass - The Railway Bay)

#40815
It is the lot of childhood to be subject to the commandments, the forbidden, the arbitrary.

Jean-Bertrand Pontalis
(Windows)

#40816
How quickly we looked like an old man at the time! As we strive not to be today in order to escape the chain of time!

Jean-Bertrand Pontalis
(Low tide high tide)

#40817
It takes several places in itself to keep any chance of being yourself.

Jean-Bertrand Pontalis
(The love of beginnings)

#40818
I had never cared about my health or my age. But for some time I felt tired, my nights were interrupted by sudden awakenings - and in those hours the lucidity is fierce. I was asleep at dawn, and only painfully came out of this half-sleep to grumble against the absurdity of the world and the futility of everything. I skinned the proper names as if that of one mingled with that of the other, the most familiar telephone numbers escaped me as if the thread that connected me to my friends could break at every moment. I often had back pain, sometimes coughing, in short I felt not old but worse aging, inexorably aging, and I had trouble admitting this finding of a progressive body failure. What I dreaded most was that I would soon find myself unable to be sensitive to the new, to be marked and modified by the unexpected - or else it would only be in fleeting moments that would leave no trace. My identity was acquired, I would be reduced to that little thing that would never cease to accompany me. From there came my morning gloom: this bitter weariness to find myself the same, day after day, while in my nights rich in apparitions, stories, events, my nights wickedly interrupted, I had been a thousand others! The only idea that I would soon resemble those of my older friends whose interests I had seen, year after year, the interests shrink, the existence to be shrivelled, the greedy withdrawal on themselves increase without their knowledge, this one idea revolted me. It looked like they were anticipating a future status of mummy encased in its strips in order to spare themselves a process of decomposition.

Jean-Bertrand Pontalis
(A man disappears)

#40819
PSYCHIC CONFLIT If conflict is undoubtedly a major part of the psychoanalytic experience, if it is relatively easy to describe it in its clinical modalities, it is more difficult to give a metapsychological theory. Throughout the Freudian work, the problem of the last basis of the conflict has received different solutions.

Jean-Bertrand Pontalis
(Vocabular of psychoanalysis)

#40820
Our comment attempted, on the main concepts he encountered, to raise them or at least to shed light on their ambiguities, to possibly explain their contradictions; it is rare that these do not lead to a problem that can be found at the level of experience itself.

Jean-Bertrand Pontalis
(Vocabular of psychoanalysis)

#40821
To this elusive I, always ready to fade, to faint, but active, to this out-of-center I - it is not a center but a source - I have given a name, the infans: to the one, to what has no name.

Jean-Bertrand Pontalis
(Before)

#40822
Would a dream ever be just a self-portrait, beyond the mirror?

Jean-Bertrand Pontalis
(The Awakened Sleeper)

#40823
Here is analyzed the whole conceptual apparatus of psychoanalysis: not everything she tries to explain, but everything that serves her to explain.

Jean-Bertrand Pontalis
(Vocabular of psychoanalysis)

#40824
To give death, without doubt, is the most radical way to ward off death that is known to be inevitable while ignoring the moment of its occurrence. Give it: death then ceases to be perceived as a threat, felt as a loss, a disaster, an unjust punishment. It is a gift that is given to a loved one whose suffering has become intolerable (euthanasia would be an altruistic crime) or that one agrees with oneself (suicide, and many accidents, more or less provoked, which are all camouflaged suicides). Suicide is a personal decision. I choose the moment and the modality - revolver, poison, defenestration. Death is no longer what falls on me, at its own time. In a sense I become, giving me death, stronger than her. I can believe myself is his master.

Jean-Bertrand Pontalis
(One day, crime)

#40825
Memory is misleading, he knows it, it invents even though it is convinced to reproduce; the line between imagination and reality is so tenuous that it becomes imperceptible and that he, the novelist, must ignore it.

Jean-Bertrand Pontalis
(Brother of the previous)

#40826
First, I lived outside my family where, as in any family, there was a secret law of silence. Not that we were particularly reserved - we even had our volubles - but everything that is transmitted loudly among his own, everything that ties them together, attaches them to each other, hatred or love, resentment, malaise, cannot be said. A child perceives this more strongly than an adult. And would she succeed in admitting, all this passion, that the effect, as we see later in couples eager for transparency, would be null and void. Only the unspoken cements the life of families, a life that does not move.

Jean-Bertrand Pontalis
(The love of beginnings)

#40827
I hate violence and now I'm about to write a book about crime. If I hate her so much, this outburst of violence is because I dread it and try to protect me from it, like a child who, after his mother has carefully lined her bed, thinks she is safe from the nightmare.

Jean-Bertrand Pontalis
(One day, crime)

#40828
Before, for everyone, it's his childhood. Whether you see it as a green paradise or denigrate it like Sartre in The Words, whether it is the object of nostalgia or that one rejoices in having come out of it, like the prisoner freed from his cell, so unhappy, we never tire of mentioning it, that age, to remember the precious moments, as if there was in him something unforgettable that would have shaped our future by leaving forever its mark.

Jean-Bertrand Pontalis
(Before)

#40829
At the beginning, there is indeed a relationship of reciprocal interlocking between psychoanalysis and literature. Remember: the case stories of the Hysteria Studies that Freud worries about "reading like novels", the Scientific Psychology Project thrown on paper like a poem in creative fever, a little crazy, that we know, the "analysis" with Fliess in the form of exchanged letters, the dream stories of the Traumdeutung with what they suppose to be written , Oedipus tragedy before being complex, Hamlet, the Gravida, the identification to Goethe - Poetry and Truth -, to Moses - the Tables of the Law ... The review would be endless.

Jean-Bertrand Pontalis
(Central Laboratory: Interviews, 1970-2012)

#40830
For this is where the paradox of the transfer lies: the analyst is both the forwarder and the recipient.

Jean-Bertrand Pontalis
(The force of attraction)

#40831
The dream ignores nothingness.

Jean-Bertrand Pontalis
(Crossing the shadows)

#40832
My hypothesis is that each dream, as the object of the analysis, refers to the mother body.

Jean-Bertrand Pontalis
(Between dream and pain)

#40833
Phallic woman, phallic mother Woman fantasmatically equipped with a phallus. such an image may take two main forms depending on whether the woman is depicted either as carrying an external phallus or a phallic attribute or as having kept the male phallus within herself.

Jean-Bertrand Pontalis
(Vocabular of psychoanalysis)

#40834
I looked like those tourists who go from site to site, from a church portal to a castle without leaving their eyes their blue or green guide, trying to check if what is in front of them corresponds to what is inscribed in the guide. They can't see anything. They refuse to allow themselves to be absorbed, even for a few moments, by what is there, within reach of their gaze, offered. They trust the guide more than they trust themselves, they don't know how to perceive.

Jean-Bertrand Pontalis
(Brother of the previous)

#40835
However, there is no question of denying it, this heavy surname. It would have been to deny my father, whose name does not appear in any dictionary, only, forever, in my memory. Throughout my teenage years, I had to resolve this contradiction: to be, above all, my father's son and not be at any price the descendant of his family. No doubt to keep the image alive in me, and to me alone- no, not the image: the presence of this beloved-loving father, who died very young, I had to flee all the members of a family that had committed the unforgivable fault of not being him.

Jean-Bertrand Pontalis
(Brother of the previous)

#40836
p. 43: Analysis, dreaming, writing: three active movements that dep me of the self. The self is lost, the I am there (...)

Jean-Bertrand Pontalis
(Windows)

#40837
Where does it come from that we elect certain words? That there are kind or detestable in our eyes when others say nothing or nothing to us and that there are some so heavy that it seems urgent to deliver them? (p. 13) ... hence this book in the form of lexicon

Jean-Bertrand Pontalis
(Windows)

#40838
Friendship is a shelter that protects from the pain of loving.

Jean-Bertrand Pontalis
(Monomotapa's Dream)

#40839
So what do we have left? Some confidence. Trust in what? in this: the crossing, however long, so arduous, as perilous as it may be, will take place. Crossing appearances, crossing borders, crossing time, crossing places, images, events of the day and those events of the night that are dreams, moving memories and imaginary figures (are there others?), crossing mainly transfers (two words that could be considered synonymous).

Jean-Bertrand Pontalis
(This Time Doesn't Pass - The Railway Bay)

#40840
Only the wandering mood brings trouble to our lives. Stones, like the dead, ignore moods.

Jean-Bertrand Pontalis
(Low tide high tide)

#40841
He doesn't like to be told about his roots. I share his dislike. It is the whole world that is our root.

Jean-Bertrand Pontalis
(Low tide high tide)

#40842
Should the analysis only be effective in a fundamental misunderstanding?

Jean-Bertrand Pontalis
(On the margins of the days)

#40843
and then Eric was born... it was immediate life, made of sensations before language took away all the freshness.

Jean-Bertrand Pontalis
(Low tide high tide)

#40844
The only being that keeps you in company is yourself. This "self" may change, not be the same, although I do not recognize myself in old photographs or today in the mirror of my bathroom (...), does not prevent that it is always self. In the long run, this permanent company becomes boring. How can we misrepresent company? Leaving each other without getting lost completely ?... To get rid of yourself without disappearing?

Jean-Bertrand Pontalis
(Monomotapa's Dream)

#40845
It is only when one agrees to approach this hollow, this silence, and then to sink into it at the risk of approaching the abyss, but with the hope of finding an underground source, that all these abilities have a chance to be realized.

Jean-Bertrand Pontalis
(On the margins of the nights)

#40846
Separate from oneself without collapsing, without falling into chaos where everything is confused. This is what the dream, psychoanalysis, reading, writing, travel sometimes, but always less than we had hoped for.

Jean-Bertrand Pontalis
(On the margins of the nights)

#40847
Perhaps this would be what we expect from literature, to transform the extreme singularity of fact, but without ever erasing it, accentuating it instead, into something aimed at the universal or at least capable of joining the other in its own singularity.

Jean-Bertrand Pontalis
(One day, crime)

#40848
in the short story "With...", a man goes to visit friends in the hospital but also to simple acquaintances .... because of persistent guilt... for he was absent at the time of his father's death..."Today he wondered: What am I going to look for when I go to approach these sick people? I do not feel a vocation as a nurse or a good sister. it is not compassion, it is not self-pity. So what? Do I fear that no one will be by my side when my time comes? (p.38-39)

Jean-Bertrand Pontalis
(Low tide high tide)

#40868
Donald Winnicott did not know the status of parent, he did not have to exercise what psychoanalysts like to call the "paternal function" (as if becoming a father, being a father, was a function!). Having had no children, he knew, like no other therapist, to connect with the hundreds of children he received. Winnicott or the child doctor.

Jean-Bertrand Pontalis
(The Awakened Sleeper)

#40869
Saying like Winnicott, even with humor, that you can be as creative in cooking eggs on the plate as Schumann composing a sonata, don't you find that a bit abusive? If I express an emotion, I don't create anything. I'm afraid Winnicott is a little fooled by his love for the child (and mother). Having said that - and again I reject the concept but acknowledge it - talking about creativity Winnicott reminds us that the world of our perceptions is dead letter as long as it is not animated by a look.

Jean-Bertrand Pontalis
(Losing sight)

#40870
Psychology Magazine: You write: "Separate oneself: a task as painful as it is inevitable and even necessary for those who do not agree to stay put and who has the desire to move forward, to go ahead of what, not being oneself, is likely to be to come." Is that really about changing? J.-B. Pontalis: Yes, it's going out of what's known about yourself. That's what I've always been looking for. Before becoming a psychoanalyst, I was a philosophy teacher. One day— I was 29 years old - a student from hypokhâgne said to me, "They are your classes, but you feel like you don't really believe them." At the time, it didn't make much effect on me, but then I realized that she was telling the truth: I was fluent in language, speech, but I didn't live my words. First I had to get away from my masters, especially Sartre who, though generous, was so overwhelming... By separating from Sartre, then from Lacan, each time I separated, "taken" from who I was at the time and the concepts that carried me then - you know, we can also find ourselves locked in concepts. It was a long time before I really recognized myself in my word, in what I was writing. Thus, there is for everyone to free themselves from the different identifications that mark his life. This is what it is, to be alive: to try not to remain frozen in an age, in a position, and also to be able to navigate, to go back and forth in the different periods of his life: to find the child in itself, his part of femininity, his adolescent revolt... Then, all ages are telescoped, as in dreams, where an element of the vigil and memories of the very first years mix. The important thing is that it moves.

Jean-Bertrand Pontalis
(Source inconnue)

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