Acknowledgements

This book is the outcome of a journey during which I have been privileged to encounter many inspiring individuals who have contributed to my development and thinking as a psychoanalyst.

My thanks to Alessandra Lemma, the editor of the New Library of Psychoanalysis, for her support for this project and to my anonymous readers for their comments that enabled me to improve the manuscript.

Over the last 30 years, the British Psychoanalytic Society has provided a forum for discussions and exchanges with a group of passionate friends and colleagues who are responsible for the teaching, analysis, supervision and training of our candidates. I cannot enumerate all of them. I have, however, particularly valued the clinical and theoretical conversations over the years with Catalina Bronstein, Rosemary Davies, Sira Dermen, Sara Flanders, Anne Harrison, Michael Parsons, Caroline Polmear, Joan Raphael-Leff and Joan Schachter. The exchanges with friends and colleagues at the Spanish Club and The Young Adults Research Group were important markers in my trajectory.

The students who have attended my seminars during this time and my supervisees have challenged me to keep up to date with questions of theory and clinical practice.

Among the ancestors who are no longer with us, I wish to pay homage to Marion Burgner, Rose Edgecumbe, Pearl King, Nina Coltart and Dinorah Pines; Mervin Glasser, André Green, Jean Laplanche, J. B. Pontalis, Joseph Sandler and Harold Stewart.

The creation of the Psychoanalysis Unit by Joseph Sandler and later the MSc in Psychoanalytic Theory at UCL by Peter Fonagy have been markers in the panorama of psychoanalysis in London and

the United Kingdom. I have been involved in teaching and supervising students for 19 years now. During most of this time, I coordinated the Freud seminars and the seminars on sexuality. I have valued the challenges raised by the younger generations of students and am rewarded by their engagement with psychoanalytic ideas.

My anthropologica