Tribute: Thank you, Jean-Michel!

Thank you, Jean-Michel!

Jean-Michel Quinodoz was a quiet, reserved man who yet had a deep, lasting impact on those who worked with him. The answer to this seeming paradox may lie in his unique combination of profound kindness, impressive internal strength and firm intellectual and moral rigour. What John Steiner (2013) said in his tribute to Hanna Segal comes to mind because it could also apply to Jean-Michel: “truth without kindness is not really true, but we would add that kindness without truth is not really kind” (Steiner 2013, quoted in Sedlak 2016, 1499). As Jean-Michel was close to Hanna Segal (Quinodoz 2007), there may be more than just a psychoanalytic link here, with also a similarity in their approach to life and relationships.

I first met Jean-Michel in his seminar on the chronological reading of the works of Sigmund Freud. In the French training model, which we apply in the Swiss Society of Psychoanalysis, candidates are mostly free to choose their seminar programme, but friends who were already in training told me that this was the place to begin. They were right: one of the many things I owe to Jean-Michel is this seminar, which offered me a solid understanding of Freud and an enduring bedrock for all my subsequent study of the vast psychoanalytic literature.

Jean-Michel made us work very hard. It was not only that reading (nearly) all of Freud’s works in three years is a challenge all on its own (the husband of a colleague jested that now they were three in bed at night: his wife, himself and Sigmund Freud). It was also that Jean-Michel asked us to take turns writing summaries of the historical, biographical and intellectual context of each work, of its main concepts and of how these evolved in the subsequent psychoanalytic literature. These texts were always simultaneously valued by him and submitted to scrutiny. We were also expected to begin our discussion of each work with a question about something in the text that we did not understand. Thus, from