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Jean-Michel Quinodoz is a psychoanalytic writer of unusual modesty, clarity and accessibility. He also has an enviable capacity to keep his eye very strictly on his chosen ball. In his earlier book, The taming of solitude (1999), that ‘ball’ was a specific phenomenon observable towards the ending of an analysis, arising from the working through of separation and object-loss anxieties. Quinodoz describes the phenomenon as being that of ‘buoyancy’ — an unsatisfactory translation of the French ‘portance’, signifying the patient's experience of a kind of pleasurable uplift, a sense of being able to ‘fly with his own wings’. This sensation occurs as a consequence of being able, and enabled, to work through the mourning process and to draw, increasingly, on the internalised containing function of the analyst, rather than depending solely on the external presence. I have long associated this process of increasing separateness with a rather wonderful passage from a letter of Keats to his friend Joshua Reynolds: