Love of Beginnings

Winner of the Prix Femina and considered a masterpiece of autobiography, this is J. B. Pontalis' lyrical meditation on his own life. One of France's pre-eminent psychoanalysts, he is co-author of the classic The Language of Psychoanalysis and he has also been a member of the editorial committee of Les Temps Modernes. Love of Beginnings is a reverie on his personal trajectory and ponders especially his 'love and hatred of words' - language's limits and abuse and the impirialistic claims made on its behalf, in their different ways, by Satre and Lacan. It is also as essay that instantiates aspects of Pontalis' life, including his experience as a pupil of Sartre at a Paris lycee in 1941 and as a student of Lacan in 1954.