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I intend to continue, no doubt inconveniently at times, in a spirit of genuine friendship, hoping that everyone in the SPM feels free to speak and to make the Society their own.
This is how Roger Dufresne ended the interview I conducted with him for the journal Filigrane. Twenty years later, in September 2021, he expressed the same concern, and the same dream for the future, in a letter addressed to his “dear sisters and brothers”: “Dare! Dare, young women and young men…. Voice is not given, it is taken. It's up to you!”
As a passionate facilitator and unifier until the end, Roger cultivated an intense desire to transmit psychoanalysis, with all his characteristically affectionate generosity. This generosity was evident in the openness, warmth, and benevolence with which he welcomed new experiences, ideas, critical discussions—anything generated in exchange with his beloved colleagues, supervisees, and friends. He cultivated the art of making everyone he came into contact with feel “special.”
Roger was demanding, first and foremost of himself: he nuanced, refined, chiselled every word of his many texts, constantly reworking each version. We see this in the title of the aforementioned letter to his colleagues: “Version quinquies”!