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This Crossroads article is an introduction to a section of three reviews of books by Quebec Francophone authors (Lussier, Scarfone and Imbeault) to be published together and written by the Associate Book Review Editor for Canada.
The three books from Quebec Francophone authors that are reviewed in this issue of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis exemplify why Quebec is a rich and unique crossroads of psychoanalytic cultures with its juxtaposition of influences from France, Great Britain and the United States. Originally founded linguistically and culturally by France, Quebec has remained closely connected to the entire range of French thought and paradoxically distinguished itself from France linguistically and culturally. The influence of Great Britain has been a heavy heritage of colonizing force leaving a bitter taste for many; nevertheless the spirit of Quebec nationalism is an ever-present dynamism manifesting itself differently in each era of Quebec history. The effect of the United States, especially with the rise of media and technology, has been more like an osmotic force infiltrating subliminally. Finally, in Quebec as in France, psychoanalysis is divided into IPA and non-IPA worlds and Lacan's influence rises intermittently like effervesce from the ocean depths and breaks forth at the surface, even in the IPA world.
In the first review, which is centred on the history of both Quebec and psychoanalysis, a recently graduated analyst, Emmanuel Piché, reviews the memoir of André Lussier who was one of the founders of psychoanalysis in Quebec. Within a generation or so, Quebec's Quiet Revolution in the 1950s and 60s transformed a profoundly conservative closed Catholic society into a contemporary, sexually liberated and open society. As the quest for intellectual enrichment pushed beyond the borders of Quebec, many Francophone analysts trained in France or the United States whereas André Lussier chose to train in England with Anna Freud. The way Piché h