Growing old: A journey of self-discovery

Danielle Quinodoz, trans. by David Alcorn, London, Routledge, £14.99 (paperback), £52.50 (hardback)

Many will already be familiar with Danielle Quinodoz, a distinguished Swiss psychoanalyst, and her body of work. This, her third book, is a drawing together into a coherent whole, something from her previously published material on ageing interwoven among a rich patchwork of clinical cases, philosophical musings and gritty personal experience. Initially I found the rather unusual chapter headings – ‘one small second of eternity’, ‘strait is the gate’, rather arcane and baffling, leaving me with an unpleasant uncertainty. It may be that this mirrored the often-reported anxiety experienced by younger analysts when confronted with their first older patient in analysis. How would I negotiate myself around this book? What is it about? Obviously it is about growing old, the title says that much; but it is about so much more.

I found that I could not read the book from cover to cover. I kept going round in circles, re-reading what I thought I had digested, only to find new layers of meaning in the same way as I often do when reading Freud. I also became tantalized by the sub-headings. They are broken down into sometimes tiny, bite-sized gems of ideas or information, some of which could have been expanded on even further. For example, I particularly like her brief but apposite foray into boredom. It is an area that is of particular interest to me as a psychiatrist as depressed patients may complain of boredom. Dementia may give rise to those feelings also. Quinodoz here explores the conceptualization of boredom as a by-product of a denial of death and the denial of the passage of time. With rich use of metaphor she describes how some people might wedge themselves into a repetitively boring routine life, denying or ignoring the past, and not examining the future too closely either because of what it might contain. These people complain of boredom but may choose it in preference