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interest is still dominated by the work of Freud and the reflection on the two metapsychologies he proposed. Even if since a long time the role of the object in the psychic structuration of a subject is recognized in French psychoanalysis, the current use of the term intersubjectivity qualify in France the encounter between two subjects, patient and analyst, during the treatment. III. Cda. The Ego, the Self, the Subject and the Object The premise of the introduction of intersubjectivity can be found since the fifties, through D. Lagache who used the term of intersubjectivity about the analytic situation, as a psychological description but without theorizing it. J. Lacan who argued for the necessity to read and return to Freud, was more interested in the question of the subject than in intersubjectivity. He considered subjectivity and intersubjectivity as not psychoanalytical. His main concept was the “subject of the unconscious”. One difficulty should be pointed out in reading Freud concerning translation into French and one consideration is important as regards his way of thinking. First the problem was and still is of how to translate “Ich”. In French, the term chosen was “moi”, that is the “ego” but it is not fully satisfying. “Ich” means also “je” (e.g. “I”) or “le sujet”, the subject. The other remark is that nowhere is Freud talking of internal object or external object, something introduced by M. Klein and her followers. Freud is only talking about the object and it covers a lot of aspects – from the object of the world outside to the object of the fantasies – without separation between all the meanings of an object. Through the influence of reading Freud, few French psychoanalysts followed Klein’s conception of an ego and fantasies and internal objects since the beginning. Most French psychoanalysts prefer to use the concept of representation to the one of internal objects, and keep the ambiguity of the notion of the object, between the object of the drive and the external object. Lacan introduced the idea that the ego is alienated and that the only interest of psychoanalysis was “the subject of the unconscious”, which is not the ego, this one emerging through the “mirror stage” only to be alienated by identifications (1966). There was for Lacan a split between the ego and the subject. It was also a way to fight the conceptions of ego psychology and authors like R. Loewenstein, who was, before his departure to the US, one of the founders and an eminent member of the Paris Society. In another and personal line of research, P. Aulagnier had described the birth of the “je”, the “I” (1975). Whereas in Great Britain, such authors as W. Bion and D.W. Winnicott were describing the role of the mother in the birth of the psyche of an infant, the French work on the metapsychological representation was the following: Jean Laplanche described an object whose enigmatic messages were the source of the drive inside the subject (1987). On the opposite side was André Green arguing for a drive rooted in the biological body, having to look for the object to become represented (1997).
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