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[[Image:Lacan-TV.gif|thumb|right]]
[[Jacques Lacan|Jacques-Marie Émile Lacan]] (1901 – 1981) was a [[French]] [[psychiatrist]] and [[psychoanalyst]].
[[Lacan]] has become an important figure in many fields beyond [[psychoanalysis]].
[[Lacan]] became one of the most important figures in the history of [[psychoanalysis]].
His impact has been felt across a broad range of disciplines, from feminist philosophy and film theory to the spheres of literature, politics, and cultural studies.
The most controversial [[psychoanalyst]] since [[Freud]] himself, [[Lacan]] has had an immense influence on literary theory, philosophy, and feminism, as well as on [[psychoanalysis]] itself.
[[Lacan]]'s work has done more than that of any other analyst to make psychoanalysis a central reference to w hole field of discipline within the human sciences.
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A dramatic personage with enormous intellectual energy, Lacan maintained friendships and theoretical engagements with a wide variety of people, from the artists André Breton and Salvador Dali, to the philosophers Georges Bataille, Raymond Queneau, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and such historians of thought as Alexandre Kojève and Alexandre Koyré who transformed the intellectual landscape in France in the 1930s.
In the years following the war, from the mid-1950s through the 1970s, Lacan taught a yearly seminar in Paris that was attended by many of France’s most prominent intellectuals.
This work not only established Lacan as a major figure in psychoanalysis, but served as the platform by which psychoanalytic theory both absorbed and challenged major intellectual movements in structuralism, anthropology, linguistics, phenomenology, and disciplines such as anthropology and mathematics, with which Lacan sustained serious and extended dialogue.
Lacan is arguably the leading figure, after Freud, in the effort to bring psychoanalytic thought into dialogue with other disciplines, and he is largely responsible for the place occupied by psychoanalysis today in literary and cultural theory.
==Biography==
Born in 1901 to an upper-middle class family of successful merchants from Orleans with strict Catholic roots, Lacan attended the prestigious Collège Stanislaus where he received a rigorous classical education in Latin, poetry, philosophy and theology.
The protected environment of the institution was disrupted in 1915 when part of the Collège was transformed into a hospital for wounded soldiers. In 1919, Lacan started his medical training in Paris, where he became friends with Breton, Aragon, Dali, and other members of the Surrealist movement.
By 1927, he had entered clinical training in psychiatry at the Sainte-Anne hospital in Paris, where he would later teach (and where Foucault would also work), and he began to publish a series of neurological papers on paralysis, mental automatism, war trauma, and hallucinatory mechanisms, based on clinical case studies.
In 1932 he finished his doctoral thesis on paranoia, translated Freud’s paper on jealousy, paranoia and homosexuality into French, and started his analysis with Rudolph Loewenstein.
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[[Lacan]]'s original training was in medicine and psychiatry, and his prepsychoanalytic work was on [[paranoia]].
The publication of his doctoral thesis, which dealt mainly with a woman patient suffering from a [[psychosis]] that led her to attempt to murder an actress (1932), won him the admiration of [[Breton]] and the [[surrealism|surrealist group]], with which he was birefly associated.
