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At once a memoir and a personal version of the author’s highly influential Language of Psychoanalysis, this work by one of the world’s leading proponents of psychoanalytic theory and practice offers an autobiographical perspective on the private “vocabularies” that develop between analyst and patient. Because our ways of understanding the world are mediated by our use of language, J.-B. Pontalis suggests that a close look at our private lexicon can uncover a great deal about what we value. Beginning with one of his own linguistic preoccupations, the metaphor of the window, Pontalis considers language as a vehicle for both self-awareness and self-deception; he explores how we choose or eschew certain words to create our life-stories and demonstrates how these words conceal―and reveal―our most intimate preoccupations and desires.

J.-B. Pontalis is a psychoanalyst and the author of many books, including The Language of Psychoanalysis, with Jean Laplanche. Pontalis was the founder of La Nouvelle Revue de Psychanalyse and served as the journal’s editor from 1970 to 1984, and he won the 2001 Mary S. Sigourney Prize for his outstanding contribution to psychoanalysis. Anne Quinney is an assistant professor of French at the University of Mississippi.