Emotional Vertigo : Between Anxiety and Pleasure

ISBN-13: 9780415148368 / Angielski / Miękka / 1997 / 216 str.

Danielle Quinodoz;Danielle Quinodoz;Alain Gibeault

Opis

There are few people who have never experienced vertigo, and in many instances the symptom has a psychic rather than physical cause. In this book, Danielle Quinodoz gives a phenomenological account of various forms of psychosomatic vertigo, drawing on both Freudian and Kleinian theory to support her definition of the symptom as an expression of separation anxiety concerned with movements in space and time. Through a clinical case study of a particular patient, Luc, the author describes the development of symptoms, and at each stage of Luc's treatment identifies the different types of vertigo which appear to express different anxieties. Among these are fusion-related vertigo, vertigo related to being dropped, vertigo due to attraction to the void and competition-related vertigo, which appears in an Oedipal context. Through this description of Quinodoz' clinical work we gain an insight into the vicissitudes in the object relationship and the role of the analyst in making the patient aware of the psychological cause of their symptom.

In this unique, prize-winning study Danielle Quinodoz unravels the unconscious significance of the feelings of vertigo which arise in situations where there is no immediate physical danger of falling and no organic cause. She traces the origins of such emotional vertigo to inner anxieties around separation which are expressed somatically at different levels according to the level of anxiety.

Through a detailed case study of a patient who developed the symptoms of vertigo during analysis the author offers some thought-provoking insights into the vicissitudes of the object relationship and the importance of the role of the analyst in helping the patient translate sensation into representation. She also reflects on the links between anxiety and pleasure in the experience of vertigo, clearly exemplified in sports such as rock-climbing or skiing, and shows how vertigo is inexorably linked to questions of equilibrium at the psychic as well as the physical level.

Emotional Vertigo is an excellent introduction to some of the central themes of current psychoanalytic thought.

Spis treści

Gibeault, Foreword. What is Vertigo? Fusion-related Vertigo. Vertigo Related to Being Dropped. Suction-related Vertigo. Anxiety About being Sucked up by the Object. Imprisonment / Escape Related Vertigo. Vertigo Due to Attraction to the Void: The Emergence of Internal Space. Expansion-related Vertigo. Competition-related Vertigo. Vertigo, from Anxiety to Pleasure. What Makes a Candidate for Vertigo. Vertigo in the Work of Sigmund Freud and Melanie Klein. Dangerous Games with Vertigo. Equilibrium: A Continuous Construction.

O autorze

Danielle Quinodoz is a psychoanalyst in private practice in Geneva. She is also a training psychoanalyst of the Swiss Psychoanalytic Society and con>sultant at the Department of Psychiatry, University of Geneva.