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In French psychoanalysis, few authors had use of the notion of the self, even if all were cautious about the adaptative part of the ego and none could adhere to the Ego psychology idea of an ego without drives related actions and conflicts. The idea of a true self and a false self (D.W. Winnicott) was much accepted but not completely because the idea of the self as really different from the ego was not welcomed. Some authors refer to the self in different ways, not exactly the self of Jacobson or the one of Kohut. The difficulty in using the notion of the self in a clear way was probably a reason it did not had a great success in France (see the separate entry SELF). Such difficulties led analysts to use the concept of subject with a different meaning than the one of Lacan whose theory and practice were not followed by French IPA psychoanalysts. The idea was that there was a part of the ego integrating the drive impulses through the link with the objects, i.e. the subject. This was the work of Raymond Cahn (1991) who put the accent more on the ‘ subjective appropriation’ process than on the subject itself. This work was followed by a reflection on the subjectivation process with main contributions by Bernard Golse and René Roussillon, in a book edited by François Richard and Steven Wainrib (2006). Green (2002), facing this complexity proposed a ‘ lignée subjectale ’ [a subject line]. III. Cdb. Objects Relations, Interactions and Interpsychic An important French author, Maurice Bouvet , worked on object relations theory at the same time as E. Jacobson but in a different way. This line of thinking led to researches on the transference-countertransference dynamic inside the session and Michel De M’Uzan (1978/1994) described the ‘ chimera ’ and the ‘ paradoxical thinking ’, something created inside the analyst during the session, coming from the patient and the analyst and figured in the analyst mind, a communication from unconscious to unconscious. It was the description of an intersubjective being, part of the two protagonists of the session. At another level, other authors studied interactions between patient and analyst, always with the preoccupation of the unconscious and of the drives in mind. René Kaës (1976) studied the group functioning highlighting the play of intersubjectivity and the creation of a new entity inside a group, the ‘group psychic apparatus’ (l’appareil psychique groupal). Investigating mainly psychosis and schizophrenia since the beginning of the sixties, Paul-Claude Racamier (1992) described the links , the interactions and the roles inside a psychotic family or inside institutions. Serge Lebovici (1994) introduced in France the notion of enactment, for him ‘ mise en jeu ’, which was the interpersonal acting repetition inside the session between the analyst and the couple mother and child, coming from the transference and counter-transference interplay. The work of Belgian Francophone analysts Nicole Carels, Marie-France Dispaux, Jacqueline Godfrind-Haber, Maurice Haber (2002) was about the role of the interpsychic space, receiving transferential and counter-transferential movements, on the patient’s intrapsychic changes. They took into consideration the ‘ shared acted experience’ (l’expérience agie partagée) and worked on the boundaries between intrapsychic and interpsychic. Bernard Brusset (2006) who prefers to speak of interpsychic rather than intersubjectivity, too phenomenological for him, introduced, concerning the realm of interpsychic, the idea of ‘ The
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