You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
In his new book, Le Malêtre, René Kaës, a French scholar and analyst who collaborated with Didier Anzieu, proposes a contemporary revision of Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents. The choice of a neologism for the title, malêtre, literally the antonym of well-being, is significant of Kaës's need to reformulate the new manifestations of malaise and psychic suffering in contemporary societies.
This book is the culmination of his lifelong clinical and theoretical research on intersubjective transmission in groups. Kaës has been a prolific author, and it is unfortunate that only one of his books is now available in English translation, Linking, Alliances, and Shared Spaces: Groups and the Psychoanalyst (2007). In addition, an exhaustive review of Kaës's work by Lewis Kirshner was published in JAPA (2006).
Kaës postulates that theoretical changes in psychoanalysis since Freud are intertwined with the mutations of contemporary societies (technological and biotechnological changes, transformations in family structure, migrations of populations, and terrorist activities). Malêtre relates to the difficulty of being and existing among others in society. Thus it is not only a feeling like malaise, but a topographic term identifying different pathologies present at the intersection of intrasubjective and intersubjective life. For Kaës, the bedrock of psychic existence derives not only from