Jacques Lacan 1901 – 1981

Jacques Marie Emile Lacan was a French psychiatrist and psychoanalyst whose return to Freud through structural linguistics reshaped psychoanalytic theory and exerted a wide influence on twentieth-century continental philosophy, literary theory, and feminist thought. His seminars, held in Paris from 1953 onward and published over decades, developed the famous distinctions of the imaginary, the symbolic, and the real, the mirror stage, and the structuring of the unconscious like a language. His Ecrits, gathered in 1966, became a touchstone of French intellectual life. He founded and twice dissolved his own school, the Ecole freudienne de Paris.

Jacques-Marie Émile Lacan was born in Paris in April 1901 into a Catholic bourgeois family. After medical studies and training in psychiatry under Gaëtan Gatian de Clérambault at the Sainte-Anne Hospital, he completed his medical doctorate in 1932 with a celebrated thesis on the case of 'Aimée', which the surrealists immediately adopted. He underwent analysis with Rudolph Loewenstein, joined the Société psychanalytique de Paris in 1934, and from the early 1950s became the dominant figure in French psychoanalysis through the weekly Seminar he held without interruption from 1953 until 1980.

His one collected book, Écrits (1966), gathers writings of twenty-five years; the Seminar itself, transcribed and edited by his son-in-law Jacques-Alain Miller, has appeared in successive volumes since 1973. His institutional career was a series of secessions: from the SPP to the Société française de psychanalyse in 1953, then in 1964 to his own École freudienne de Paris, which he dissolved in 1980 in favour of the École de la Cause freudienne.

Lacan's slogan 'a return to Freud' covered a sweeping reformulation of analysis through linguistics, structural anthropology, and topology. He taught the mirror stage; the three orders of the Symbolic, Imaginary, and Real; the thesis that the unconscious is structured like a language; the objet petit a as cause of desire; the four discourses of master, university, hysteric, and analyst; and in his late work the Borromean knot and the sinthome. He died in Paris in September 1981.