Jean-Bertrand Pontalis

Jean-Bertrand Lefèvre-Pontalis (; 15 January 1924, Paris – 15 January 2013, Paris) was a French philosopher, writer, editor and psychoanalyst.

Career A student of Jean-Paul Sartre, Pontalis became a professor of philosophy in the 1940s, before undergoing an analysis with his associate Jacques Lacan the following decade. He was, however, one of the minority group of disciples/analysands who did not follow Lacan into the École Freudienne de Paris, but rather stayed within the legitimist sphere as founding members of the Association Psychanalytique de France, of which he later became president.

Together with Jean Laplanche, he wrote the influential work The Language of Psychoanalysis in 1967; while among his later, more literary writings were Windows and Crossing the Shadows. "When words fail, it is because, without realising it, one is about to touch a different earth".