Obituary: In Memoriam Jean-Michel Quinodoz (1934–2025)

Last summer, we lost our colleague and friend Jean-Michel Quinodoz, who died on 16 August 2025. An eminent psychoanalyst, a training member of the Swiss Psychoanalytical Society, a fine clinician and the author of many books, his personal and international influence was felt by us all. We wish to pay him homage here.

Jean-Michel Quinodoz was born in 1934 in Sion-Valais, a mountainous Swiss canton with a predominantly Catholic culture. Throughout his life he remained strongly attached to his native valley, to which he devoted several works, including the book Marie des collines (Quinodoz 2005) dedicated to the story of his aunt, a self-educated peasant woman who ran a literary cafe in her village. More recently, he published a pamphlet about the musician Henri Dutilleux’s stay in this same village, Henri Dutilleux à La Sage (Quinodoz 2018), illustrated with his own drawings. In an interview with the Canadian magazine Revue Filigrane (Quinodoz 2012), he mentioned in relation to these works a wish for reparation associated with his understanding of the creative act, a conception he had long shared with Hanna Segal. His religious culture seems to have deeply influenced his belief and his need for spirituality that remained lively throughout his life.

He lost his mother at an early age and was sent to a Catholic boarding school; his father remarried some years later. He confided to me how importantly this mourning had featured in his personal experience. After his medical studies in Geneva, he trained in psychiatry in the department headed by Julian de Ajuriaguerra, a neuropsychiatrist and pioneer of child psychoanalysis, whose influence and psychoanalytic convictions predominated in treatment and training. In an interview given to Revue Filigrane (Quinodoz 2012), he mentioned his greater need for human understanding, having been disappointed by general medicine as a practice and the inadequacies of physiology. His own discovery of psy