Introduction

Several of the articles featured in this issue were originally delivered at Canadian conferences in Toronto and Montreal. Howard Levine's “The Interplay of Emotions in the Analytic Session” was presented as part of the conference “Symbol Formation and Transformation in Theory and Practice” at the Annual General Meeting of the Canadian Psychoanalytic Society in Montreal, June 1, 2018. Giuseppe Civitarese's “Champ incarné et rêverie somatique” (Embodied field and somatic reverie) was originally presented in Toronto as part of the conference “The Intimate Room. Seeing What the Patient Sees: New Concepts on Transference” at the Annual General Meeting of the Canadian Psychoanalytic Society, June 2, 2016, as were the stimulating discussions by François Sirois, “Civitarese et la question du Rêve,” and by Marie Claire Lanctôt Bélanger, “Les mots du rêve.” An English translation of the Civitarese text is available on the Journal website: academicjournals.ca

In the special subsection of this issue, “The Death Instinct, Self-destructiveness, and the Wish for Immortality,” we have assembled a range of original studies revolving around this Freudian theme. Christiane Gariépy-Boutin provides an unusually thorough and scholarly exposition of the death instinct concept, especially as it has evolved in the French literature. Philip Cheifetz's sensitive study of a teenage suicide's diary introduces fundamental existential and relational perspectives on the wish to die. All these themes are taken up again in important articles by Arlene Kramer Richards and Arnold Richards and their respective discussants, Stephen Leibow and Joseph Fernando. These articles were originally presented at the conference “Death, Immortality, and Unconscious Fantasy,” held in Toronto on April 21, 2018. We have included excerpts from the Introduction and Closing Remarks of the conference chair, Les Fleischer.