Winner of the 2010 Sigourney Award!Quinodoz brings together views of eminent analysts to present a comprehensive approach to the experience of loneliness, anxiety about which commonly leads people to analysis and which stems from unresolved anxiety about separation.

Winner of the 2010 Sigourney Award! Psychoanalysts would argue that at the root of anxiety about loneliness, which commonly brings people into analysis, lies anxiety about separation, unresolved since childhood. When re-experienced in analysis, the painful awareness of solitude - the sense of being a separate person - can become a rich source of personal creativity. In The Taming of Solitude, Jean-Michel Quinodoz brings together the views of Freud, Klein, Hanna Segal, W.R.D. Fairbairn, D.W. Winnicott, Anna Freud, Margaret Mahler, Heinz Kohut, John Bowlby and others, presenting a comprehensive approach to the experience of loneliness, a universal phenomenon which can be observed in everyday life and in any therapeutic situation. Written with clarity and insight, The Taming of Solitude will be of great interest to all psychoanalysts and therapists.

"The Taming of Solitude is well written and a pleasure to read. ... The many paragraph headings allow the reader space to pause and think, and there is a comprehensive bibliography and index. It is an authoritative account of separation anxiety and the ample clinical material gives a glimpse into how Quinodoz works with it. It will certainly be of interest to anyone working with analytical ideas and to interested readers in general." - British Journal of Psychotherapy "The Taming of Solitude (La Solitude Approivsee) is an important work, not only because it provides a precise presentation of the subject and of the existing views on it ... but also because it shows us a psychoanalyst at work, with his concepts, hopes, difficulties and - in a fascinating parallel to the subject of the book - his creative solitude." - J Manzano, Psychoanalysis in Europe "The author proposes that we reflect on the precious concept of 'buoyancy' ('portance') which he has created to describe the state of the patient who has sufficiently internalized the capacity of the analyst to carry him so that he is able to start carrying himself on his own ... This is a fundamental condition for the taming of solitude and loneliness so that the analysis can leave not only the analyst but also the analysis, and can transfer the experience he has obtained from analysis to his own life ... This is what this beautiful book teaches us". - Cleopatre Athanassiou, Rev. Franc. Psychoanal