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Jacques Marie Émile Lacan was born on 13 April 1901, one year after the publication of Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams. He was the eldest of three children. His father, Charles Marie Alfred Lacan, was the Paris sales representative for a provincial oil and soap manufacturer, and his mother, Émilie Philippine Marie Baudry, a devout Christian who assisted her husband in his work. The Lacan family lived in comfortable conditions in the Boulevard du Beaumarchais before moving to the Montparnasse area. The young Jacques attended a prestigious Jesuit school, the Collège Stanislas where he began to study philosophy, especially the work of Spinoza. In 1919 he started his medical training in the Faculté de Médecine in Paris. From 1926 onwards he began his specialisation in psychiatry and, in the same year, he co-authored his first publication which appeared in the Revue Neurologique. Very soon he becomes interne des asiles and then, in 1932, Chef de Clinique. He worked for three years in the area of forensic medicine and, in 1932, he received his doctorate diploma in psychiatry. He published his thesis which is entitled De la psychose paranoiaque dans ses rapports avec la personnalité (On Paranoid Psychosis in its Relations to the Personality). He posted a copy of his doctoral dissertation to Freud who acknowledged receipt by sending him a postcard. In the same year, his translation of Freud’s article ‘Some Neurotic Mechanisms in Jealousy, Paranoia and Homosexuality’ was published in the Revue Française de Psychanalyse. The 1930s marked the development of Lacan’s relation to the psychoanalytic and the surrealist movement. He started his training analysis with Rudolph Loewenstein who later, after moving to the United States, became one of the founding fathers and champions of Ego-Psychology. He joined the Société Psychanalytique de Paris (SPP), the French psychoanalytic society officially recognised by the International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA), first, in 1934, as a candidate member, and then, in 1938, as a full member (Membre Titulaire). At the same time he became involved in the French surrealist movement. He developed a friendship with Breton and Dalí and published articles in a series of surrealist publications including the journal Minotaure. But his interest in intellectual matters did not end here. He met James Joyce and became well acquainted with the work of Jaspers and Heidegger and, of course, Hegel, by attending (together with Queneau, Bataille, Merleau-Ponty, Aron, Klossowski and others) the seminars on Hegel given by Alexandre Kojeve at the École Pratique des Hautes Études. In 1936 he agreed to write, together with Kojeve, an article comparing Freud with Hegel which was planned to appear in the journal Recherches philosophiques with the approval of Koyré; this article was never published. In 1934 he married Marie-Louise Blondin. Together they had three children; Caroline, born in 1934, Thibaut, in 1939, and Sibylle in 1940. Their marriage lasted until 1941. In 1939 Lacan began a relationship with Sylvia Bataille, an actress formerly married to George Bataille, and 1941 marked the birth of their daughter, Judith. He married Sylvia in 1953. After the war, Lacan was recognised as one of the major theorists of the SPP and, as a member of its training committee, he introduced new statutes, making psychoanalytic training available to non-medical candidates. Eventually he was elected president of the SPP but this development produced a lot of controversy and a series of disagreements often focusing on Lacan’s technique (including his introduction of analytic sessions of variable duration). The controversy led to the formation, mainly by Lagache, of a new psychoanalytic society, the Société Française de Psychanalyse (SFP). Lacan resigned from the SPP and joined the SFP in 1953. In the same year he started his public seminar (he was conducting a private seminar from 1951) at the Sainte-Anne hospital. In 1956 the SFP launched its journal; the first issue was devoted to the work of Lacan. He translated Heidegger’s paper ‘Logos’ which was published in La Psychanalyse. The influence of his friend Claude Lévi-Strauss as well as that of structural linguistics (Saussure and Jakobson) was becoming increasingly apparent in his work. The SFP applied for recognition by the International Psychoanalytic Association but the IPA asked for the termination of Lacan’s training programme. In 1963 the SFP gave in to the demands of the IPA. Lacan was effectively forced to resign from the SFP and to stop his seminar at Saint-Anne. He was invited by Fernand Braudel to continue his seminar at the École Pratique, and, with the encouragement of Louis Althusser, he resumed his seminar in January 1964 at the École Normale Supérieure. Meanwhile, he acknowledged the importance of Foucault’s book on Madness and Civilization. He founded the École Freudienne de Paris (EFP). A 900-page collection of his essays was published under the title Écrits, boosting his reputation both in France and internationally. While in his thesis he acknowledged the importance of Claude, Pinchon and others of his teachers in psychiatry for his development, now he considered Gaetan Gatian de Clerambault as his sole master in psychiatry, pointing out that he owed to him his encounter with the Freudian corpus. He was invited, in 1966, to visit the United States where he addressed the conference on ‘The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man’ organised at the Johns Hopkins University. In 1969 a Lacanian department of Psychoanalysis was founded at the new and controversial Université de Paris VIII at Vincennes (later to be transferred to Saint-Denis). Although Lacan was very critical of revolutionary action he was held by some as partly responsible for the events of May 1968 and was asked to leave the École Normale Supérieure. In fact, direct engagement in politics was always a problematic area in his personal life; he could be described as rather apolitical and sceptical in terms of his personal commitment to political action, although he was intrigued by political issues. This sceptical attitude brings to mind Freud’s scepticism illustrated in his ‘half-conversion’ to Bolshevism: when he was told that communism would bring at first some hard years and then harmony and happiness, he answered that he believed in the first half of this programme. 12 During that period, though, Lacan for the first time added his signature to a petition asking for the liberation of Regis Debray, who was imprisoned in Bolivia, and on 9 May 1968 he signed a manifesto supporting the student movement. On 2 December 1969, however, speaking to hundreds of students he offered them the following statement: ‘Revolutionary aspirations have only one possibility: always to end up in the discourse of the master. Experience has proven this. What you aspire to as revolutionaries is a master. You will have one!’ (Lacan in Julien, 1994:64). He moved his seminar to the Faculté de Droit at the Pantheon. In 1973, his first published seminar appeared, edited by Jacques-Alain Miller;it is his seminar of 1964, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. In 1974, Lacan reorganised the Department of Psychoanalysis at Vincennes and authorised Jacques-Alain Miller to be its chairman. A two-part interview with Lacan was broadcast by French television and, in 1975, he travelled again to the United States, where he gave lectures at Yale, Columbia University and MIT. Five years later his son-in-law was elected to the board of directors of the EFP amid a lot of controversy and accusations of nepotism. As the protest mounted, Lacan decided to dissolve unilaterally the EFP (the dissolution is ratified by the EFP on 27 September 1980). He founded the École de la Cause Freudienne and travelled to Venezuela to open the first international congress of the Fondation du Champ Freudien, which had been founded by himself and his daughter, Judith Miller, in 1979. He died in 1981. =====1901=====
* 13 April - [[Jacques-Marie Émile Lacan]] is born in Paris (France) (95 boulevard Beaumarchais), the first child (eldest son) of (prosperous, bourgeois parents) Alfred Lacan (1873–1960) and Emilie Baudry (1876–1948) (a middle-class Roman-Catholic family) (a family of solid Catholic tradition).
* 25 December - Lacan's brother Raymond is born (who dies two years later).
* 25 December - Lacan's sister Madeleine(-Marie) is born.
* Raymond Lacan dies.
* 16 November - Birth of Marie-Louise Blondin, Lacan’s first wife.
* Birth of Marc-François, Lacan's brother (25 December).
* 1 November birth of Sylvia Maklès, Lacan’s second wife.
* Freud founds the International Psycho-Analytical Association (IPA).
* During the war, Alfred Lacan is drafted as a sergeant, and parts of the Collège Stanislas are converted into a hospital for wounded soldiers. Lacan starts reading Spinoza.
* Lacan is taught philosophy by Jean Baruzi, a remarkable Catholic thinker who wrote a dissertation on Saint John of the Cross.
* Lacan loses his virginity and starts frequenting intellectual bookshops like Adrienne Monnier's Maison des amis des livres and Sylvia Beach's Shakespeare and Company at rue de l'Odéon. New interests in Dadaism and the avant-garde.
* Lacan finishes his secondary education at the Collège Stanislas.
* Autumn Lacan decides to embark on a medical career and enters the Paris Medical Faculty.
* Lacan meets André Breton (1896-1966) and becomes interested in the surrealist movement.
* Lacan meets André Breton and acquaints himself with the Surrealist movement.
* Lacan is discharged from military service because of thinness. In the following years he studies medicine in Paris.
* Lacan discharged from military service due to thinness.
* January 20 Madeleine, Lacan's sister, marries Jacques Houlon. Soon after, they move to Indochina.
* Lacan's first collaborative publication appears in the Revue Neurologique. The Société Psychanalytique de Paris (SPP) is founded.
* 4 November creation of the Société Psychanalytique de Paris (SPP), the first association of French psychoanalysts.
* Lacan begins his clinical training in psychiatry.
* Lacan begins his clinical training and then works in several psychiatric hospitals in Paris.
* Clinical training at the Clinique des Maladies Mentales et de 1’Encéphale, directed by Henri Claude (1869-1945), which is connected to L’Hôpital Sainte-Anne in Paris. Lacan meets Henri Ey (1900-1977).
* Clinical training in psychiatry at the Clinique des maladies mentales et de l'encéphale, a service linked with the Sainte-Anne hospital in Paris and directed by Henri Claude.
* Lacan studies under Gaëtan Gatian de Clérambault at the special infirmary for the insane attached to the Police Préfecture.
* Engagement with Marie-Thérèse Bergerot, to whom Lacan will dedicate his doctoral thesis. Marriage of Georges Bataille (1897-1962) and Sylvia Maklès.
* Clinical training at L’Infirmerie Spéciale de la Préfecture de Police, under the supervision of Gaëtan Gatian de Clérambault (1872-1934).
* Lacan's brother, Marc-François, joins the Benedictines.
* Lacan’s brother enters the Benedictine Order and moves to the abbey of Hautecombe in the French Alps, adopting the new name of Marc-François on 8 September 1931, when he takes his monastic vows.
* Clinical training at L’Hôpital Henri Rousselle, also connected to Sainte-Anne Hospital in Paris.
* Clinical training at the Hospital Henri Rousselle.
* Lacan publishes his first non-collaborative article in Annales Médico-Psychologiques.
* Meets Salvador Dalí (1904-1989).
* July Arranges to meet Salvador Dalí who has published “The rotten donkey” in July 1930. His poetic praise of paranoia has attracted Lacan's attention. Lacan and Salvador Dalí remain friends all their lives. Friendship with the novelist Pierre Drieu La Rochelle. From 1929 to 1933 Lacan is the lover of Olesia Sienkiewicz, Drieu's estranged second wife. August–September Lacan takes a two-month training course at the Burgh ölzli clinic in Z ürich.
* Lacan becomes increasingly interested in surrealism and meets Salvador Dalí.
* Lacan presents some of his hypotheses at the Evolution Psychiatrique and publishes the following year in the Revue française de psychanalyse his translation of Freud's "On Some Neurotic Mechanisms in Jealousy, Paranoia and Homosexuality." Receives a diploma as a forensic psychiatrist. He publishes ''Structure des psychoses paranoïaques'', Semaine des Hôpitaux de Paris, 7 July 1931.
* Lacan receives his doctorate in psychiatry with a thesis on the relationship of paranoia to personality structure. This attracts considerable interest in surrealist circles. His interests in paranoia, language, phantasy and symptoms, the main concerns of the surrealists, bring him close to them. The main idea in the first period of Lacan's work, 1932-48, is the domination of the human being by the image.
* Lacan publishes his doctoral dissertation (On paranoiac psychosis in its relations to the personality) and sends a copy to Freud. Freud acknowledges receipt by postcard.
* Lacan publishes articles in ''Minotaure''. He starts attending KojEve's lectures on Hegel.
* Two articles by Lacan are published in the surrealist journal Minotaure. Alexandre Kojève begins lecturing on Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit at the Ecole des Hautes Études.
* Lacan, who is already in analysis with Rudolph Loewenstein, joins the SPP as a candidate member. He marries Marie-Louise Blondin in January, who gives birth to their first child, Caroline, the same month.
* Lacan enters analysis with Rudolph Lowewnstein and becomes an active member of the SeociEtE Psychanlytique de Paris (SPP).
* Marc-François Lacan is ordained priest.
* Reads a major papers to the International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA) on the mirror-stage theory which remains unpublished (the version included in ''Escits'' dates from 1949).
* Lacan presents his paper on the mirror stage to the fourteenth congress of the IPA at Marienbad on 3 August. He sets up private practice as a psychoanalyst.
* 3 August Lacan attends the 14th Congress of the IPA at Marienbad (Máriánské Lézně, Czech Republic), where he presents ‘Le stade du miroir’.
* 3 August Lacan attends the 14th congress of the International Psychoanalytic Association at Marienbad, where he presents his paper on the mirror stage. After ten minutes, he is brutally interrupted by Ernest Jones. Quite upset, Lacan leaves the conference. He will never submit his text for publication.
* 8 January birth of Caroline Marie Image Lacan, first child of Lacan and Marie-Louise Blondin.
* 8 January Birth of Caroline, first child of Lacan and Marie-Louise Blondin.
*Accepted as training analyst by the International Psychoanalytic Assoication.
* Lacan becomes a full member of the SPP, and his article on the family is published in the Encyclopédie Française. After Hitler's annexation of Austria, Freud leaves Vienna to settle in London; on his way to London he passes through Paris, but Lacan
* Thibaut, the second child of Lacan and Marie-Louise, is born in August. On 23 September Freud dies in London at the age of eighty-three. After Hitler's invasion of France the SPP ceases to function. During the war Lacan works at a military
hospital in Paris.
*Second World War. THe SPP is decimated and the society effectively ceases to exist. Lacan works in a military hospital.
* Sibylle, third child of Lacan and Marie-Louise, is born in August.
* Works at Val-de-Grâce, the military hospital in Paris. During the German Occupation, he does not partake in any official activity. "For several years I have kept myself from expressing myself. The humiliation of our time under the subjugation of the enemies of human kind dissuaded me from speaking up, and following Fontenelle, I abandoned myself to the fantasy of having my hand full of truths so as to better close it on them." In "Propos sur la causalité psychique," from 1946 and published in ''Écrits''.
* June installation of the Vichy regime. The SPP suspends all its activities.
* 26 November birth of Sibylle Lacan, third child of Lacan and Marie-Louise Blondin.
* Sylvia Bataille, estranged wife of Georges Bataille, gives birth to Judith. Though Judith is Lacan's daughter, she receives the surname Bataille because Lacan is still married to Marie-Louise. Marie-Louise now requests a divorce.
* Spring Lacan moves to 5, rue de Lille in Paris, where he will continue to see patients until his death.
* Spring Lacan meets Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980), Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) and Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961). He becomes Picasso’s personal physician.
* 14 February birth of Jacques-Alain Miller, Lacan’s future son-in-law.
* After the liberation of France, the SPP recommences meetings. Lacan travels to England where he spends five weeks studying the situation of psychiatry during the war years. His
separation from Marie-Louise is formally announced.
* The SPP resumes its activities.
* 9 August divorce of Sylvia Maklès and Georges Bataille.
* Lacan publishes a report of his visit to England.
* In 1946, the S.P.P. resumes its activities and Lacan, with Nacht and Lagache, takes charge of training analyses and supervisory controls and plays an important theoretical and institutional role. After visiting London in 1945 he publishes ''La Psychiatrique anglaise et la guerre, in Evolution psychiatrique''.
*In the seocnd period of Lacan's work the function of the image is subordinated and the dominant field of knledge in his thinking is linguistics.
* Lacan becomes a member of the Teaching Committee (Commission de l’Enseignement) of the SPP.
* Lacan presents another paper on the mirror stage to the sixteenth IPA congress in Zurich.
* Lacan meets Claude Lévi-Strauss.
* Lacan begins giving weekly seminars in Sylvia Bataille's apartment at 3 rue de Lille. At this time, Lacan is vice-president of the SPP. In response to Lacan's practice of using sessions of variable duration, the SPP's commission on instruction demands that he regularise his practice. Lacan promises to do so, but continues to vary the time of the sessions.
*The SPP's Training COmmission begins to raise the issue of Lacan's use of 'short sessions' in his analyses. By 1951 Lacan is writing about the Imaginary, SYmbolic and the Real.
* Seminar on Freud’s case of the Wolf Man.
* Lacan gives a seminar on Freud's Wolf-Man case.
* The SPP, the Paris society, moves ahead on its plan to start a separate training instiute. Lacan takes a strong exception to Nacht's concept of psychoanalysis as a discipline within neurobiology.
* During this period of crisis at the S.P.P. (1951-52), the responsability for the report on the 1953 conference in Rome "Fonction et champ de la parole et du langage" is assigned to Lacan. At the time he is considered to be the most productive and original theoretician of the group, all the more so because he always uses the classical terms of the Freudian othodoxy when speaking within the S.P.P.
* Seminar on Freud’s case of the Rat Man.
* Lacan gives a seminar on Freud's Rat-Man case.
*There is a split in the SPP over the question of lay analysis. Lacan resigns his membership of the SPP and joins the SociEtE FranCaise de Psychanalyse (SFP).
*Holds his first public seminar (on Freud's papers on technique). These seminars continue for twenty-six years.
* The IPA refuses the SFP's request for affiliation. Heinz Hartmann intimates in a letter to Daniel Lagache that Lacan's presence in the SFP is the main reason for this refusal.
* The positive reception of the expression "the return to Freud" and of his report and discourse in Rome give Lacan the will to reelaborate all the analytical concepts. His critique of analytic literature and practice spares almost nobody. Lacan returns to Freud yet his return is a re-reading in relation with contemporary philosophy, linguistics, ethnology, biology and topology. At Sainte-Anne he helds his seminars every Wednesday and presents cases of patients on Fridays.
* Attacks the work of eog-psychologists (Hartman, Kris, Loewenstein and others)
* Lacan will remain at Sainte-Anne till 1963. The first ten Seminars elaborate fundamental notions about psychoanalytic technique, the essential concepts of psychoanalysis, and even its ethics. Students give presentations yet it is the Tuesday night conferences that fed Lacan's commentaries on Wednesdays.
* The SFP renews its request for IPA affiliation, which is again refused. Lacan again appears to be the main sticking-point.
* "The flexibility of the S.F.P. increases Lacan's audience. Celebrities are attracted to his seminars (Hyppolite's analysis of Freud's article on Dénégation, given during the first seminar, is a well-known example). Koyré on Plato, Lévi-Strauss, Merleau-Ponty, Griaule, the ethnologist, Benvéniste among others attend his courses.
* During this period Lacan writes, on the basis of his seminars, conferences and addreses in colloquia, the major texts that are found in Écrits in 1966. He publishes in a variety of journals, notably in L'Evolution Psychiatrique, which takes no account of the S.P.P. / S.F.P. conflict and Bulletin de la Société de Philosphie. J.B. Pontalis, Lacan's student, publishes with his consent the accounts of Seminars IV, V and VI in ''Bulletin de Psychanalyse''. — ''Le séminaire, Livre IV: La relation d'objet et les structures freudiennes'', Paris: Seuil, 1994.
* 9 May Lacan presents “The agency of the letter in the unconscious; or, Reason since Freud” (E/S, pp. 146–78) to a group of philosophy students at the Sorbonne, later published in La Psychanalyse (1958). Less Heideggerian and more linguistic, the paper sketches a rhetoric of the unconscious based on the relationship between signifier and signified and generates the algorithms of metaphor and metonymy corresponding to Freud's condensation and displacement.
* In the S.P.P. executive board, positions and titles are exchanged with perfect regularity until Serge Leclaire becomes secretary and then president. Yet Lacan emerges, if not the only thinker of the group, at least as the one who has the largest audience and the most audacity, especially since his practice of short sessions secures him the greatest number of analysts-in-training. A Lacan group begins to organize itself, identifiable by its language and its modes of intevention in discussions.
* ''Le séminaire, Livre V: Les formations de l'inconscient'', Paris: Seuil, 1998.
* The SFP again renews its request for IPA affiliation. This time the IPA sets up a committee to evaluate the SFP's application.
* The first issue of ''La Psychanalyse'' from 1956 is entirely devoted to Lacan: it includes the Rome report and discourse with the discussions that followed with Lacan's response, the commentaries from Seminar I on Hyppolite's analysis of denegation and Lacan'S translation of Heidegger's ''Logos''. In a following issue Hesnard will comment on ''Wo es war, soll Ich werden'' that according to Lacan the "I" must come to the place where the "id" was: "là où était le 'ça' 'je' dois advenir." This opposes the S.P.P.'s translation: "the ego must drive out the id."
* In his ''Ethics'' Lacan defines the true ethical foundations of psychoanalysis and constructs an ethics for our time, an ethics that would prove to be equal to the tragedy of modern man and to the "discontent of civilization" (Freud). At the roots of the ethics is desire: analysis' only promise is austere, it is the entrance-into-the-I, ''l'entrée-en-Je''. "I must come to the place where the id was," where the analysand discovers, in its absolute nakedness, the truth of his desire. The end of psychoanalysis entails "the purification of desire." This text functions throughout the years as the background of Lacan's work.
* ''Le séminaire, Livre VII: L'éthique de la psychanalyse'', Paris: Seuil, 1986. ''The Seminar, Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959-60'', New York: Norton, 1992.
* In the third period of Lacan's work the key idea is that of the three 'orders', the Imagianry, Symbolic and the Real.
* 15 October Death of Lacan's father.
* The IPA committee arrives in Paris to interview members of the SFP and produces a report. On consideration of this report, the IPA rejects the SFP's application for affiliation as a member society and grants it instead 'study-group' status pending further investigation.
* At the colloqium on dialectic organized by Jean Wahl at Royaumont the previous year, Lacan defends three assertions: psychoanalysis, insofar as it elaborates its theory from its praxis, must have a scientific status; the Freudian discoveries have radically changed the concepts of subject, of knowledge, and of desire; the analytic field is the only one from where it is possible to efficiently interrogate the insufficiencies of science and philosophy. This major intervention will appear in Écrits as "Subversion of the Subject and Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious," where the subject of psychoanalysis is neither Hegel's absolute subject nor the abolished subject of science. It is a subject divided by the emergence of the signifier. As to the subject of the unconscious, it is impossible to know who speaks. It is "the pure subject of the enunciation," which the pronoun "I" indicates but does not signify. Yet the key concept is that of desire: "it is precisely because desire is articulated that it is not articulable in a signifyng chain."
* Meanwhile S.F.P. members want to be recognized by the I.P.A. At the Congress of Edinburgh in 1961, the I.P.A. committee recommends that the S.F.P. become a supervised study group of the I.P.A. Moreover, in a series of twenty requirements it asks the S.F.P. to ban Lacan (also Dolto and Bergé) from the analysts' training: the problem of the short sessions, which was already at stake during the first split, is back for discussion. Lacan did not "give in on his desire," and neither did the I.P.A. make concessions about its principles. He was not banned from psychoanalytic practice nor from teaching: he was denied the right to train analysts. Driven to choose between Lacan and affiliation with the I.P.A., Paris opts for the time being not to make any decision. Moreover, a motion is adopted by the Bureau of the S.F.P. stating that "any attempt to force the expulsion of one of its founder members would be discriminatory, and would offend against both the principles of scientific objectivity and the spirit of justice." Lacan and Dolto are elected president and vice-president.
Later that year, Lacan is appointed ''chargé de cours'' at the ...cole Pratique des Hautes ...tudes (Paris) and a series director at ...ditions du Seuil. The series will be known as ''Le Champ freudien'': in time his Seminars and ...crits will be published in there.
* Expelled, finally, from the International Psychoanalytic Association Lacan foudns his own school, L'Ecole Freudienne de Paris (EFP). His audience begins to change; there are fewer psychiatrists and more philosophers, anthropologists, linguistics, mathematicians and literary critics. Gives Seminar on The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis.
* The IPA committee conducts more interviews with SFP members and produces another report in which it recommends that the SFP be granted affiliation as a member society on condition
* In January Lacan moves his public seminar to the École Normale Supérieure, and in June he founds his own organisation, the École Freudienne de Paris (EFP).
* Lacanians form a Study Group on Psychoanalysis organized by Jean Clavreul, until Lacan officially founds L'Ecole Française de Psychanalyse. Soon it becomes L'Ecole Freudienne de Paris (E.F.P.). "I hereby found the Ecole Française de Psychanalyse, by myself, as alone as I have ever been in my relation to the psychoanalytic cause." The E.F.P. is organized on the basis of three sections: pure psychoanalysis (doctrine, training and supervision), applied psychoanalysis (the cure, casuistics, psychiatric information), and the Freudian field (commentaries on the psychoanalytic movement, articulation with related sciences, ethics of psychoanalysis).
* Having founded his own école, Lacan's renown increases considerably in his new settings at the rue d'Ulm. He keeps presenting cases of patients at Sainte-Anne; members of his école work and teach in Paris in hospitals such as Trousseau, Sainte-Anne and Les Enfants Malades; and others join universities or hospitals in the provinces (Strasbourg, Montpellier, Lille). In his seminars he explains his project to teach "the foundations of psychoanalysis" as well as his position within the psychoanalytic institution. His audience is made of analysts but also of young students in philosophy at the E.N.S., notably Jacques-Alain Miller, to whom Althusser assigns the reading of "all of Lacan" and who actually does it. It is him who asks Lacan the famous question: "Does your notion of the subject imply an ontology?"
* ''Le séminaire, Livre XII: Problèmes cruciaux pour la psychanalyse'', unpublished.
* Publishes first book: ''Escrits''. The project of publishing Lacan's twenty-five annual semianrs is undertaken by his son-in-law and director of his school, Jacques-Alain Miller. There is increasing interest in his work in France and abroad.
* Lacan wants to continue to train analysts, his first priority. Yet, at the same time, his teaching is adressed to the non analysts, and thus he raises these questions: Is psychoanalysis a science? Under what conditions is it a science? If it is-the "science of the unconscious" or a "conjectural science of the subject"-what can it, in turn, teach us about science? Cahiers pour l'Analyse, the journal of the Cercle d'Epistémologie at the E.N.S. is founded by Alain Grosrichard, Alain Badiou, Jean-Claude Milner, François Regnault and Jacques-Alain Miller among others. It publishes texts by Lacan in three of its issues that very year. In July Judith Lacan marries Jacques-Alain Miller.
* Introduction of the highly controversial ''la passe'' which marks the transition from analysand to analyst. Lacan sees the decision to become na analyst as analogous to the act of becoming a poet.
* Lacan states in the ''Acte de Fondation'' that he shall undertake the direction of the école during the four years, "a direction about which nothing at present prevents me from answering." In fact Lacan remains its director until the dissolution in 1980. He divides the école into three sections: the section of pure psychoanalysis (training and elaboration of the theory, where members who have been analyzed but haven't become analysts can participate); the section for applied psychoanalysis (therapeutic and clinical, physicians who have neither completed nor started analysis are welcome); the section for taking inventory of the Freudian field (it concerns the critique of psychoanalytic literature and the analysis of the theoretical relations with related or affiliated sciences). To join the école, the candidate has to apply to an organized work-group: the cartel.
* Student uprising in Paris, the 'May events'. The publication of the first issue of the official journal of the Freudian School, ''Scilicet''.
* The novelty of the proposition of 1967 lies in the modification of access to the title of Analyst of the Ecole (A.E.), a rank superior to that of Member Analyst of the Ecole (A.M.E.). The analysts appointed as A.E. are those who have volunteered for the passe and have come victorious out of the trial. The ''passe'' consists of testifying, in front of two passeurs, to one's experience as an analysand and especially to the crucial moment of passage from the position of analysand to that of analyst. The ''passeurs'' are chosen by their analysts (generally analysts of the école) and should be at the same stage in their analytic experience as the passant. They listen to him and then, in turn, they testify to what thay have heard in front of a committee for approval composed of the director, Lacan, and of some A.E. This committee's function is to select the analysts of the école and to elaborate, after the selecting process, a "work of doctrine."
* The issue of the passe keeps invading the E.F.P.'s life. "Le quatrième groupe" is formed around those who resign from the E.F.P. disputing over Lacan's methods for the analysts' training and accreditation. Lacan takes a stand in the crisis of the university that follows May 1968: "If psychoanalysis cannot be articulated as a knowledge and taught as such, it has no place in the university, where it is only a matter of knowledge." The E.N.S. director, Flacelière, finds an excuse to tell Lacan that he is no longer welcome at the E.N.S. at the beginning of the academic year. Moreover, ''Cahiers pour l'Analyse'' has to stop its publication, but Vincennes appears as an alternative. Michel Foucault asks Lacan to create and direct at Vincennes the Department of Psychoanalysis. Lacan suggests that S. Leclaire, rather than himself, should undertake the project. Classes start in January. Thanks to Lévi-Strauss Lacan moves his seminars to the law school at the Panthéon.
* ''Le séminaire, Livre XVI: D'un Autre à l'autre'', unpublished. In there Lacan argues that "the Name-of-the-Father is a rift that remains wide open in my discourse, it is only known through an act of faith: there is no incarnation in the place of the Other."
* In his seminar ''L'envers de la psychanalyse'' Lacan establishes the four discourses: Master's, university's, hysteric's and the analyst's discourse. He discusses the Father of ''Totem and Taboo'' who is all love (or ''jouissance'') and whose murder generates the love of the dead Father, a figure to whom he opposes both the Father presiding over the first idealization and the Father who enters the discourse of the Master and who is castrated from the origin. "The death of the father is the key to supreme ''jouissance'', later identified with the mother as the aim to incest." Yet psychoanalysis is not constructed on the proposition'to sleep with the mother' but on the death of the father as primal jouissance. The real father is not the biological one but he who upholds "the Real as impossible." In "Radiophonie," ''Scilicet2/3'', Lacan argues that "if language is the condition of the unconscious, the unconscious is the condition of linguistics." Freud anticipated Saussure and the Prague Circle by sticking to the letter of the patient's word, to jokes, to slips, by bringing into light the importance of condensation and displacement in the production of dreams. The unconscious states that "the subject is not the one who knows what he says." Whoever articulates the unconscious must say that it is either that or nothing.
* ''Le séminaire, Livre XVII: L'envers de la psychanalyse'', Paris: Seuil, 1991.
* One novelty in Lacan's teaching is his return to the hysteric with Dora and ''la Belle Bouche erre'' (the Beautiful Mouth wanders and an allusion to the beautiful butcher's wife analyzed by Freud and carried on in ''La direction de la cure'' Three questions: the relation betwen ''jouissance'' and the desire for unfulfilled desire; the hysteric who 'makes the man' (or the Master) insofar as she constructs him as "a man prompted by the desire to know;" a new conception of the analytic treatment as a "hysterization of discourse."
* ''Le séminaire, Livre XVIII: D'un discours qui ne serait pas du semblant'', unpublished.
* As to Lacan "in psychoanalysis (as well as in the unconscious) man knows nothing of woman, and woman nothing of man. The pahallus epitomizes the point in myth where the sexual becomes the passion of the signifier." For him the structure is the body of the symbolic: "there is no sexual rapport, implies no sexual rapport that can be formulated in the structure." There is "no appropiate signifier to give substance to a formula of sexual rapport."
* "L'étourdit" ''Scilicet'' 4.
* In ''Encore'' Lacan argues that woman would only enter in the sexual rapport ''quoad matrem'' (as a mother) and man ''quoad castrationem'' (phallic ''jouissance''). Hence there is no real rapport and love as well as speech make up for his absence. And he adds: "There is woman only as excluded by the nature of words,...for man she is on the side of truth and man does not know what to do with it." In ''Le savoir psychanalytique'' from 1972, Lacan argues: "I am not saying that speech exists because there is no sexual rapport. I am not saying either that there is no sexual rapport because speech is there. But there is no sexual rapport because speech functions on that level that analytic discourse reveals to be specific to speaking human beings. The importance, the preeminence of what makes sex a semblance, the semblance of men and women. Between man and love, there is woman; between man and woman, there is a world; betwen man and the world, there is a wall. What is at stake in a serious love relationship between a man and a woman is castration. Castration is the means of adaptation to survival."
* ''Le séminaire, Livre XX: Encore, Paris: Seuil, 1975''. ''The Seminar, Book XX: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge: Encore'', New York: Norton, 1998.
* The Department of Psychoanalysis at Vincennes, which opened after the 'May events' of 1968, is reorganized and renamed Le Champ Freudien with Lacan as scientific director and Miller, his son-in-law, as president. There is a stress on the mathematical formalization of psychoanalytic theory.
* The Vincennes Department of Psychoanalysis is renamed "Le Champ freudien;" Lacan, director, and Jacques-Alain Miller, president. In ''Télévision'', Paris: Seuil, (the text is based on a broadcast on the ORTF produced by Benoît Jacquot) Lacan makes is famous statement: "I always speak the truth. Not the whole truth, because there's no way to say it all. Saying it all is materially impossible: words fail. Yet it is through this very impossibility that the truth holds to the real." ''Television'', New York: Norton, 1990.
* Lacan travels to the United States where he lectures at Columbia University (Auditorium, School of International Affairs), general discussion at Yale University (Kanzer Seminar and Law School Auditorium) followed by another general discussion at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
* ''Le séminaire, Livre XXII: R.S.I. in Ornicar?'' 2.
* Lacan posits that the notion of structure does not allow to create a common field uniting linguistics, ethnology and psychoanalysis. Linguistics has no hold over the unconscious because "it leaves as a blank that which produces effects in the unconscious: the ''objet a'', the very focus of the analytical act, and of any act. "Only the discourse that is defined in the terms of psychoanalysis manifests the subject as other giving him the key to his division, whereas science, by making the subject a master, conceals him to the extent the the desire that gives way to him bars him from me without remedy." There is only one myth in Lacan's discourse: the Freudian Oedipus complex.
* ''Le séminaire, Livre XXIII: Le sinthome, in Ornicar?'' 6.
* Publication in English of ''Ecrits - A Selection''.
* ''Le séminaire, Livre XXIV: L'insu que sait de l'une bévue s'aile à mourre, in Ornicar? 12/13''.
* Lacan unilaterally announces the dissolution of the Ecole Freudienne de Paris. The foundation of La Cause freduienne.
* ''Le séminaire, Livre XXV: Le moment de conclure''. One session only published as "Une pratique de bavardage," ''Ornicar?'' 19.
* ''Le séminaire, Livre XXVI: La topologie et le temps'', unpublished.
* Creation of Fondation du Champ Freudien, directed by Judith Miller.
* On January 9, Lacan announces the dissolution of the EFP in a letter addressed to members and published in ''Le Monde''. He asks those who wish to continue working with him to state their intentions in writing. He receives over one thousand letters within a week. On February 21, Lacan announces the founding of "''La Cause freudienne''." In July he attends an international conference in Caracas. "I have come here before launching my ''Cause freudienne''. It is up to you to be Lacanians if you wish; I am Freudian."
* ''Le séminaire, Livre XXVII: Dissolution, in Ornicar?'' 20/21.
* September 9, Lacan dies in Paris.
* Lacan dies in Paris at the age of eighty.
* Death of Marie-Louise Blondin.
* Twenty psychoanalytic organizations exist in France, nineteen of which have their roots in Lacan’s teachings.
* Jacques-Alain Miller wins a legal battle over the rights to edit and publish Lacan’s seminars.
* Death of Laurence Bataille.
* Death of Sylvia Maklès-Lacan.
* Death of Marc-François Lacan.
[[Category:Psychoanalysis]]
[[Category:Jacques Lacan]]
