Introduction

While the three of us have known each other for more than 15 years, and indeed helped each other to establish our respective psychoanalytic institutes, the Western Branch of the Canadian Psychoanalytic Society in Vancouver and the Northwestern Psychoanalytic Society in Seattle, we had not worked in a formal way together prior to our individual presentations at the CPS meeting in Vancouver in 2008. For that meeting, we all chose to write about the theme “Mentalization and Catastrophic Change.” And while we had not discussed our presentations beforehand, we all felt the underlying unity and continuity evident among the presentations as a kind of new “object,” which we respected and chose to leave unexplained so as to preserve its ineffable quality. We decided to present a triad of papers on envy at the Toronto Annual General Meeting in 2010, and then later that year these same papers—with slight modifications to one—were presented in Seattle. Again we found the same sense of continuity across differences. We are grateful to this journal for accepting these papers for publication and we are mindful of the role that the CPS, through its annual meeting, has played in providing a “container” for the development of our thinking. It is a collaboration that we hope to pursue.