You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
THE TRAINING PROGRAM at McGill initiated by W. Clifford M. Scott being intended for psychiatrists, John Sigal went to London to be trained by the British Society, of which he became an associate member. At the same time, he was working on a PhD in psychology under Hans Eysenck, as anti-analytic a psychologist as there ever was. Upon his return to Canada, John became a member of the Canadian Society.
His many interests included research, and he was for a time director of research in the Department of Psychiatry of the Jewish General Hospital.
He was very determined not to be a training analyst, even when I offered him to have a paper entitled “The Baby as a Transitional Object” count as a membership paper (at the time, I was in a position to make such an offer). Later, he took the initiative for the creation of the Professional Standards Committee, arguing that since the Society had delegated to the Institute the responsibility for training, it had a duty to oversee it.
He published in the International Journal of Psychiatry on family therapy and in the American Journal of Orthopsychiatry and the Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica on the transgenerational transmission of trauma in the children of victims of the Holocaust. I think that this was the area closest to his heart.
He had high standards for himself and for others and was a gentleman and a scholar. Would that there were more like him.