The Loss of Self: Self-Writing as a Tool in Borderline Psychoanalysis

This book offers a brilliant discussion of one of the most troubling elements of contemporary practice – the borderline – which forces the subject to confront the foundations of his identity, constructed in the relation with the other. Based on his extensive experience as an analyst, and drawing on literature with its ability to portray the torments and the loss of the self, Jean-François Chiantaretto describes the ways in which the life of the psyche is constantly subjected to a painful, conflictual process combining the consent to change with the requirement of remaining oneself. This requirement is founded on an internal listening function altered by the other, a function personified by the “internal witness”. As the author aptly points out, the Freud-Ferenczi dialogue is emblematic of this transformation inherent to the subjective experience.

Laurent Danon-Boileau is a training psychoanalyst and full member of the Paris Psychoanalytical Society, professor emeritus of general linguistics at the Cité University of Paris. He is editor-in-chief of the collection “Le silence des sirènes” (Fario).

For the past thirty years, Jean-François Chiantaretto has been elaborating an original oeuvre based on an innovative metapsychological approach centred on “the infans in the adult” and on “internal interlocution”, in analytic treatment and in “self-writing”. His work – somewhere between literary criticism and writing as a curative practice – focuses primarily on starting and starting over: in the history of psychoanalysis, in writing as self-preservation, in establishing self-representation.

Patrick Guyomard is a psychoanalyst and University Professor emeritus. He is the founder of the Freudian Psychoanalytic Society, and Director of Éditions Campagne Première.

Jean-François Chiantaretto’s books and articles present a mode of original thinking which views writing as a trace of life. His work, grounded in Freudian metapsychology and influenced by analysts from different theoretical schools, also draws on authors like Imre Kertész and Aaron Appelfeld. We travel with them to significant limits in the history of psychoanalysis and of analysts. Grounding his work in literature allows Chiantaretto to take an innovative approach to the treatment of borderline patients. His powerful writing style opposes the exclusion and isolation imposed by a reductionist “application” of psychoanalysis.

Jean-Yves Tamet is a psychoanalyst and full member of the French Psychoanalytical Association. He is editor-in-chief of the journal Le présent de la psychanalyse.