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On July 1, a stroke suddenly took the life of our colleague Johan Binette and left us all unprepared to deal with her absence. A member of the Quebec English section and a psychologist at the Montreal Children's Hospital (McGill University Health Centre), Johan was throughout her life an engaging woman, curious and full of life. Did she have a sense of what was to come, of this sudden departure, of this life that would be stolen, leaving the survivors incredulous and grief-stricken? Her many patients, young and not so young, her colleagues and friends, her two children and her family, those who loved her—there are so many who will remember the profound impact she had on their lives.
Johan was a native of Quebec City, and her first great love was music before she turned to psychology and psychoanalysis. The music of languages also attracted her, and she was fluent in French, English, and Spanish and had studied German. After obtaining a master's in psychology at Laval University, she did an internship in psychotherapy at the Institute of Psychiatry at Maudsley Hospital in England, where she also trained in group therapy. On returning to Quebec, she joined the Psychology Department of the Montreal Children's Hospital, where she readily made a place for herself as part of Dr. Irwin Disher's child psychiatry team. Dr. Disher had done his psychoanalytic training in London, and, in their work, he and his team emphasized the theories of Winnicott. Johan found there fertile ground that would influence her entire subsequent development, with Winnicott's ideas guiding not only her clinical approach, but