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In Words that Touch: A Psychoanalyst Learns to Speak, Swiss psychoanalyst Danielle Quinodoz focuses on emotional communication,
presenting theoretical considerations as well as clinical case material and discussing her belief that psychoanalysis is a treatment modality that can benefit a diverse group of patients. One of her goals in writing this volume is to educate potential psychoanalytic patients and professionals in the viability of treatment. She contends that psychoanalysis is alive and well.
Quinodoz feels that prospective patients need to demonstrate an ability to use symbolism if they are to make the best use of psychoanalysis. Early analytic work may be geared toward the development of symbolic facility. Thus, patients who are initially unaware of the existence of an internal life may be helped to discover their psychic worlds, and hence symbolic capacity, through treatment. Quinodoz describes such patients as “heterogeneous,” indicating that they may fluctuate between neurotic and psychotic aspects of their personalities. The inability to tolerate this heterogeneity often creates splitting within the psyche, causing an anxiety that for some individuals arouses a fear of madness. Failure to accept opposing feelings sometimes stirs patients to seek treatment as they struggle to ward off the prospect of losing an intact sense of self.
The book is replete with clinical illustrations. The author describes a 70-year-old patient, Berthe, who sought treatment due to depression derived from unfulfilled lifelong aspirations. Quinodoz initially questioned whether she could take such a patient into treatment. Following a failed liaison with her male analyst when she was 20, Berthe had had no further romantic encounters and had not married, nor conceived a child; she felt lethargic and unsatisfied. (This patient's first male analyst had overstepped the bounds of the professional relationship and engaged in an affair that ended badly.) The author wondered what would h