François Peraldi, Canadian psychoanalyst and professor of psychoanalysis in the Department of Linguistics of the University of Montreal, was born on May 2, 1938, in Paris, and died in Montreal, on March 21, 1993. The son of Jean Peraldi and Denise Roger, Fran-çois was the second child of a family of three boys. He was proud of his father's heritage as a Corsican montagnard peasant. He attributed his close ties to his father to the double pneumonia he contracted when he was eighteen months old, which required constant care from his father for three months. When his father was mobilized in 1939, he lost the person he loved most in the world. "My first mother," he wrote, "was not my mother, but my father."

After studying medicine Peraldi turned to psychoanalysis, and underwent a teaching analysis with Simone Decobert, an analyst with the Société Psychanalytique de Paris (SPP) (Paris Psychoanalytic Society). After being rejected...