Many patients nowadays come to analysis because of a sense of solitude that is being experienced painfully. Some patients are able to express their anxiety in words; others have no words to convey what is sometimes an intolerable sense of loneliness. They express their psychic suffering in a wide variety of ways, such as separation anxiety, disturbances in their sense of identity or somatic symptoms. What solutions can a psychoanalyst offer to such patients?
With the help of clinical examples, Jean-Michel Quinodoz will illustrate how a sense of solitude, which is a nightmare, can change in psychic quality and become a source of personal creativity and a stimulus to affective relations.
Jean-Michel Quinodoz MD is a psychoanalyst working in full-time private practice in Geneva, Switzerland. He is a Training Analyst of the Swiss Psychoanalytical Society and Distinguished Fellow of the British Psychoanalytical Society. .
He has published numerous psychoanalytic articles and four books which have been translated into many languages: The Taming of Solitude: Separation Anxiety in Psychoanalysis; Dreams that Turn Over a Page; Listening to Hanna Segal; Her Contribution to Psychoanalysis and Reading Freud: A Chronological Exploration of Freud’s Writings.
