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The French psychoanalyst René Kaës has made important contributions to psychoanalysis over the last several decades, particularly in the area of group psychology. The readers of this journal, French and English, owe thanks to David Benhaim for his helpful introduction to René Kaës's work, especially as it pertains to the theme of the sibling complex, the topic of his recent book, Le complexe fraternel (2008). In this essay, I have attempted to mediate Benhaïm's presentation for the English reader; my summary will be interwoven with a few thoughts of my own about related ideas in English psychoanalysis. I have also used Benhaïm's informative and stimulating text as a jumping off point for some reflections on the problem of translating back and forth between the two literatures.
Benhaim begins by emphasizing the “specificity” of the sibling complex. What René Kaës means by specificity is that the sibling complex is irreducible—it exists in its own right. Traditionally, as Benhaim points out, sibling dynamics have been treated as displacements of Oedipal dynamics. Kaës proposes instead that the Oedipus complex is in fact not the “nuclear” complex, or at least not the only one. Rather, it coalesces one polarity in a broader structural duality of mind that includes another “nuclear” complex—that of the sibling complex and transference. Their relationship is more like the two strands of a double helix than a causal developmental sequence.
A similar argument has been made by the British psychoanalyst Juliet Mitchell (2003) in her book Siblings. She sees the family dimension of analytic theory as acting on two separate planes: what she calls the vertical axis (child/parent, or Oedipal) and the horizontal axis (sibling), each