Mr. André Lussier

André Lussier, psychoanalyst, emeritus professor, a committed writer, and an exceptionally devoted father and grandfather, left us peacefully on November 28, 2016. He leaves to mourn his three children, Dominique (Macca), Véronique (Michel), and Catherine (Igor), as well as the family of his second wife, the late Louise Marchand.

A pioneer of clinical psychology in Quebec, trained as a psychoanalyst in London at both the Anna Freud Center and the British Psycho-Analytical Institute, he has left his unique mark on the development of psychology as a scientific discipline and on the establishment of psychoanalysis in North America, through more than 50 years of practice, teaching and writing of scientific papers and polemical essays. Vice-president of the International Psychoanalytic Association from 1989 to 1993, he received in 1996 the prestigious Sigourney Award bestowed by the American Psychoanalytic Association in recognition of his exceptional contribution to the field of psychoanalysis.

Never fearing to commit his pen to the cause of fighting intolerance and authoritarianism, the social and cultural upheavals of the Révolution Tranquille found him on the frontlines of the challenges to the existing order, as he made public his profound and incisive analysis of the unconscious dimensions of censorship, religious monopoly on education, and the death penalty, through seminal essays as bold as they were enlightening.

Unfailingly generous in his thinking, his teachings, and his unflinching ability to listen, he helped train generations of psychologists, psychiatrists and psychoanalysts, while contributing throughout his life to the building and expansion of psychoanalytical theory, from The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child papers in 1955 to the publishing of La gloire et la faute in 2006. In 2012, at age 90, he offered his last opus: Un psychanalyste dans son siècle, the powerful telling of a journey where he relentlessly pursued the study of the unconscious, however unpalatable it might be.

For his three children, having had André Lussier as a father has been, and forever will be, an immeasurable and deeply inspiring privilege.