JOHN SIGAL was a kind and lovely man, and also very tall, with an infectious grin that seemed wider than the Cheshire's cat's. As Dr. Naiman has mentioned, he was determined not to become a training analyst. When I was a candidate, he told us the reason for this during the first-year seminar, namely, that he valued freedom of thought more highly than professional status.

My father, Douglas Clifford Levin, who was a training analyst, was very fond of “Sigal” as a friend and colleague. I was acquainted with Dr. Sigal through this relationship, when he was in full swing as director of psychological research at the Jewish General Hospital. But I didn't really get to know him until I became an analyst myself, in the late 1980s and 1990s.