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Although psychoanalytic thought in France is known to American readers mainly through a small selection of the writings of André Green, Jacques Lacan, and Jean Laplanche, there are many important French authors who deserve to be read more widely. Among those I would include here, beside Piera Aulagnier, Laurence Kahn, Michel de M'Uzan, J.-B. Pontalis, and René Roussillion, is the scholarly analyst René Kaes, distinguished professor of psychology at the University of Lyon. Conversant with the German of Freud's original texts and widely read in the international psychoanalytic literature, Kaes incorporates a wide spectrum of ideas, ranging from the philosophically abstract to the complexities of clinical practice and the spadework of empirical research. His specialty has been the psychoanalytic theory and practice of therapeutic work with groups, a modality more widespread in France than in the U.S. Since his first publication, L'appareil psychique groupal: Constructions du groupe (1976), Kaes has developed a conception of the shared psychic space of the group, notably in relation to the broader issues of the complex question of “how the singular subject and the I (le Je), capable of assuming their place within an intersubjective ensemble, are constituted, transformed, or effaced” through the diverse modalities of membership in groups (Kaes 1993, p. 11; translation mine throughout).
Although his work returns repeatedly to the literature on group process (Foulkes, Bion, Anzieu, Neri, Pines) and to clinical experience with groups and families, the paradoxical nature of subjectivity as both a property of individuals and inseparable from membership in a group has been Kaes's constant preoccupation since his earliest papers. The argument is set forth in the important monograph Transmission de la