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.