Obituary: Jean Michel Quinodoz

Jean-Michel Quinodoz was the third European editor of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis but the one who transformed the post, working closely in a team with Arnold Cooper, Jorge Ahumada and me. Our aim was to try to make the journal a genuinely international source containing the very best papers, no matter where or in what language they were composed. Insofar as we succeeded and this became the model for future years, it was very largely down to him.

I first met and talked with Jean-Michel at the International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA) Congress in Amsterdam in 1993. He had been appointed by the Publications Committee of the British Psychoanalytic Society (on the advice of Anne Marie Sandler) from a short list of suitable applicants drawn up by a distinguished Search Committee comprising Terttu Eskelinen de Folch (Chairperson), Betty Denzler, Heinz Henseler, Viviane Janson, and Elizabeth Spillius. As we walked together across a large square together with Cooper and Ahumada, it was immediately obvious that Jean Michel thrived on collaboration. The immediate intensity and enthusiasm of the group discussion that day is still vivid in my imagination.

Prior to 1993, peer review for the journal existed but was somewhat haphazard in the different regions and was not well understood in the community more widely. The new editorial group assembled in Amsterdam was enthusiastic to instate it and to try to help all authors to understand what it meant – in particular that it was about assessing the clarity and adequacy of the support for positions rather than a judgement about the opinions themselves. Later that year we published an editorial (Michels 1995) by the distinguished American psychoanalyst and psychiatrist Bob Michels, on the subject, and then over the next two years or so held a series of meetings of the different boards, in which members read and rated papers independently prior to discussion. At the time, although the North American Board had establi