Words That Touch: A Psychoanalyst Learns to Speak

222 Pages·2003·31.594 MB·English

by  Danielle Quinodoz

WORDS THAT TOUCH

WORDS THAT TOUCH
A PSYCHOANALYST LEARNS TO SPEAK
Oanielle Quinodoz
Translation by
Philip Slatkin
Foreword by
Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel
KARNAC
Original French edition, Des Mots Qui Touchent, first published in 2002 by
Presses Universitaires de France, 6, Avenue Reille, 75014, Paris
This English translation published in 2003 by
Kamac Books Ltd.
118 Finchley Road, NW3 5lIT
French Edition copyright © 2002 Presses Universitaires de France,
6, Avenue Reille, 75014, Paris
English Edition copyright © 2003 Danielle Quinodoz
Danielle Quinodoz asserts the moral right to be identified as the author
of this work.
English translation by Philip Slatkin, 2003
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording, or oilienvise, without the prior written
permission of the publisher.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A C.I.P. for this book is available from the British library
ISBN: 9781855759435
Edited, designed, and produced by The Studio Publishing Services Ltd,
Exeter EX4 SJN
Printed in Great Britain
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CONTENTS
FOREWORD
Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel ix
CHAPTER ONE
The psychoanalyst of the future:
wise enough to dare to be mad at times 1
"You are mad!/f
Madness: no less mad for being invisible
Psychoanalysis goes against the grain
How is someone with no personal experience of
psychoanalysis to fonn a picture of it?
I should like to learn to speak
A language that touches
CHAPTER TWO
Heterogeneous patients:
anxiety at heterogeneity 13
We are all heterogeneous
Compatible heterogeneous components
Incompatible heterogeneous components (Albert)
One split may be hiding another
Helping a patient to tolerate his heterogeneity better
Specific aspects of the psychoanalysis of
heterogeneous patients (Laure)
v
vi CONTENTS
CHAPTER THREE
A language that touches 35
What is a language that touches?
An example from Elise's analysis
What is it that "touches" our analysands?
Listening out for bodily sensations
Other aspects of a language that touches
CHAPTER FOUR
A language that addresses the patient's "mad part" but does
not forget the part that is not mad 53
A language that talks "mad" and "not mad" together
"Mad" or not "mad"?
"Talking mad" while not forgetting that others do not
speak this language (liviD)
CHAPTER FIVE
Oedipus in search of integration 69
The Oedipus complex
A clinical example (Lina)
A clinical example (Laure)
Failure to recognize the father of infancy and the
constitution of the superego
CHAPTER SIX
The interpretation of projective identification 93
Should unconscious-to-unconscious communication
be taken seriously?
Theoretical implications of these examples
The dawning of consciousness of bodily experience
(Laure, Elsa)
Changing perspectives on projection and projective
identification
How to take full advantage of projective
counter-identification (Isa, Luc, Marie)
Projective identification:
a misunderstood concept
Projective identification and the preliminary
interviews
CONTENTS vii
CHAPTER SEVEN
Words already touch in the preliminary interviews 119
How to speak about analysis to a patient who does
not know what it involves
Emergence of insight in the preliminary interviews
(Albert, Berthe)
The analyst and the preliminary interviews
CHAPTER EIGHT
Touching with words and not with actions 133
The "touch" must be on the psychic level
The example of Berthe: touching with actions or with
words?
The example of Simone
CHAPTER NINE
The words don't matter provided that they touch 149
The analyst who lets himself be touched by a wordless
language (Sauge and "Money")
Touching by actions or touching by speaking?
Homosexual tendencies and difficulty in symbolization
CHAPTER TEN
Fragmenting splits, or The Murderer Lives at Number 21
(Steeman, 1939) 159
The fragmenting split (Marc)
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Words that touch bring time to life 169
The life-enhancing effect of past-present interaction
The patient's time (Berthe)
The analyst's time
Can the meaning of a play be grasped before its last
line is spoken?
CHAPTER TWELVE
Listening to Freud and speaking to the psychoanalysts of the
future 183
Listening to Freud
Speaking to psychoanalysts-to-be
How we inherit depends on our mourning work
viii CONTENTS
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
A vast internal world 193
Words that touch
Learning to speak
An internal world SO vast that the patient feels free
REFERENCES 197
AUTHOR INDEX 203
SUBJECT INDEX 205
FOREWORD
Janine Chasseguet-SmirgeZ1
This is an intense and captivating book, written in a flowing style.
Danielle Quinodoz is addressing those who might benefit from
psychoanalysis but lack a clear idea of what it involves or whose
knowledge of it is purely intellectual; psychoanalysts in training;
psychoanalysts, and psychotherapists in general; and readers who
aspire to enter the dimension of the unconscious.
For this purpose, she is concerned to find "words that touch". So
she becomes the Ariadne who spins a thread to guide us through
the labyrinth of the internal world. The patients she chooses for her
clinical illustrations are those she calls ''heterogeneous'' -a term
that clearly defines her approach.
That approach is characterized by the search for concrete
representations capable of arousing feelings and sensations.
Eschewing the usual expression "borderline states"f she uses a
metaphor to explain to us the difference between the borderline and
"heterogeneity". A traveller crossing the border from Switzerland
does not enter France directly. Between the two countries lies a
space-a no man's land. This, she says, is the location of the
"borderline states" with their specific mechanisms. She herself
holds both a French and a Swiss passport. This may be likened to
ix