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A good half of this fascinating book by the Swiss psychoanalyst Danielle Quinodoz consists of a systematic phenomenological account of various forms of vertigo, stemming from different psychogenic causes and displaying a variety of dynamic connotations. The two classical Freudian theories of anxiety and the Kleinian object-relations model of child development, carefully reviewed in Chapter 11, provide a mostly non-dogmatic underpinning to the author's taxonomy. Yet if offering such a classification, however sophisticated, were the main purpose of the book, it would be legitimate to question whether a relatively minor psychological symptom such as vertigo deserves the central stage Quinodoz appears to allocate to it. But because her aim is more ambitious, and her writing so creative, the concept of vertigo (and the French vertige sounds, to my ears at least, more suggestive than the Anglo-Latin term) becomes a sort of trampoline for her to perform some remarkable psychoanalytic somersaults.
After distinguishing vertigo of physical origins (a state of imbalance resulting from uncoordinated information provided by different sensory systems) from the more common psychological ‘expression of an anxiety that manifests itself through bodily