Editor's Note: In Memory of George A. Awad, MD

It is with a continuing sense of deep loss that the responsibility of introducing this special issue presents itself. For, in honoring his memory, we once more acknowledge the painful reality of George Awad's death, on May 24, 2007, at the age of 65, — when, at the height of his intellectual power and creativity, he was tragically robbed by the vicissitudes of Fate of the final twenty or thirty more years of his life.

For those of us who knew and worked with him, we are deeply grateful to him for what he gave of himself: above all, his unyielding and unswerving dedication and commitment to peace in Palestine/Israel, as well as his capacity to understand as a psychoanalyst, the impediments to peace that exist, to one degree or another, in all of us. We, his co-workers and colleagues, benefited additionally from his profound understanding of the workings of identity, trauma, and prejudice in the perpetuation of the more than 60 year conflict in his native land — as well as from his understanding that the Palestinians will not be able to mourn their losses and move on, so to speak, as long as their losses and the trauma of their losses are ongoing.

George Anis Awad was born in Acre, in Palestine; he became a refugee in Lebanon at the age of six, where he lived for the next 20 years and where he obtained his medical education. Dr Awad trained in psychiatry in the United States, and in psychoanalysis in Toronto — where he lived and practiced psychoanalysis for over 30 years. He is the author of over 40 articles and chapters in psychiatric and psychoanalytic journals and books; we publish in this issue a bibliography of his publications. In 1992, Dr Awad was appointed Training and Supervising Psychoanalyst at the Canadian Institute of Psychoanalysis in Toronto, and as such became the only Palestinian training analyst in North America, a fact of his career which lends a particularly poignant shading to his brief paper on the training analyst system in psychoanalysis which we