René Kaës (1936–2026)

René Kaës 1 passed away on 1 February 2026, after a long battle with cancer.A French psychologist, psychoanalyst and university professor, he made an extensive contribution to the psychoanalytic approach to groups that remains the main guiding reference for a great many people in the field, in France, in Latin America and elsewhere.He was born on 19 February 1936 in Fameck, in Lorraine, eastern France, the eldest of seven children of a family of modest means.As a child he lived through the war with relatives deported to Germany and others engaged in the struggle against Nazism.He wrote more than 20 books (three of them co-authored), edited or co-edited 19 collective volumes, and published more than four hundred articles, book chapters, prefaces and interviews -his chronological bibliography lists 460 items between 1957 and 2026 -many of them translated into Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, English, Greek, Turkish and Russian.In the early 1970s he playfully challenged Lacan's aphorism that the unconscious is structured like a language, proposing instead that it is structured like a group.The intuition behind this statement can be traced, through different formulations, throughout his work, until it was eventually transformed into the proposition that the subject of the unconscious is the subject of the link.It is a widespread misconception outside France that French psychoanalysis is all about Lacan.Correcting this mistake is arguably the most important first step in approaching René Kaës's work.Admittedly, the whole of the highly diverse French approach to psychoanalysis drinks from the same fountains of French scholarly culture.The importance given to the notion of the negative and a deep Cartesian influence on ways of thinking, for example, are to be found everywhere -including in the work of both Lacan and Kaës, albeit in very different forms.René Kaës was a student of Didier Anzieu, whose studies of groups pioneered the field within psychoanalysis in France, and with whom he would work for almost 40 years.Although Anzieu was initially interested in Lacan -to the point of being in 1506167G AQ0010.