J.B. Pontalis: French philosopher, writer and psychoanalyst

‘From where does the love of beginning come to us if not from the beginning of love? From the love which will have no future and perhaps in that way no end.’

Another enigmatic sentence from the French analyst J. B. Pontalis. However, despite his tantalising style there are some interesting sections. Here he is writing about memory, and how it seems that often we can’t remember our childhood, and how this can be understood.

For Pontalis amnesia is one of the characteristics of adulthood, so he suggests that perhaps the adult visits amnesia on the child, and childhood is for ever our only memory:

‘After childhood, chronology moves in with its markers, but memory is cold: that year we moved, we passed an exam, we did our military service, we got married, we were in New York, we had a book published, we fell out with a friend, Francoise was born, I stopped teaching, I broke up with Claire, no, it was she who left me, I met Claude, when was it then … in 70? In 73?’

Keeping his diaries in a shoes box – Pontalis never looks at them as there is nothing to discover.

‘My daily appointments, some titles of films, the name of a restaurant, of a town, of an author to read, the time of a train, a plumber’s address. Hard to admit that all this mirrors a life.’

Here the contrast is with childhood where there are no notebooks and no dates, nothing to make one think I mustn’t forget that nor anything to say I shall never forget it. So, because we don’t need to remember in the same way, or like in adulthood have to differentiate the essential from the incidental, everything can come to lodge within us:

‘… leaving living imprints without our intervention. Everything, no matter what, a thousand nothings: the smell of a room, the design of an ear or of a wallpaper, the creaking of a floor, a very thin and a very tall man, a car speeding past, a man crying, the cistern on a train … and, among this bric-a-brac, in this attic of debris, some images less fragmented and less enigmatic, which one tells oneself must be more powerful: one’s father taking a shower; mother in the corridor, her bathrobe half open; father again, moaning: “I’m done for” when the ambulance arrives.’

Pontalis thinks that childhood images bring with them an aura of something eternally alive ‘a brightness that doesn’t tarnish or a wound that never heals’ because they belong to a state which we can as adults only very rarely recover from when we, as children, were receptive to everything around us. In other words, if I have understood him, there are no limits and frontiers to what is being experienced when we are young. So, he can write that in his private dictionary ‘childhood and memory are synonymous’. By the time we get to formal school the field of memory is changed through milestones and seasons – and we start to process in a circumscribed way, and define what we then call memory. For Pontalis it is only when things just keep occurring to us without such egoic control that real beginnings may come into view.