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Matthias Tschabold, a contemporary Swiss poet, opens his poem, “The Hour of the Tiger” (1999), with the following lines:
If my heart is right,
I know where my dreams go.
Danielle Quinodoz has taken us to an inner landscape, where hearts are turned back against themselves and dreams are lost in a vertiginous cascade of hurt, hatred, and confusion. Elise is one of those whose hearts cannot locate their dreams. This is a landscape that Mme. Quinodoz has explored at depth, and with heart and imagination. From her work on vertigo — a condition more intimately related to our emotional lives than we previously recognized — to her exploration of “words that touch,” she has tried to help us think, speak, and dream with a touch that, at one and the same time, is more precise and more textured, more affectively resonant, than we have often dared.
I want to try and highlight just a few of the themes that Mme. Quinodoz helps locate as components of our never-ending struggle to seek, evade, and find once again a measure of psychical equilibrium. Prominent among these themes is the clinical challenge of meeting the needs of those patients she terms “heterogeneous” — an idea I will return to — but who might be depicted as those for whom experience cannot find full root, release, or resonance in the verbal symbolic realm. Instead, they are consigned to “root about,” that is, they are impelled to maneuver through action, impulse,