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It would be fair to say that there are few twentieth century thinkers who have had such a far-reaching influence on subsequent intellectual life in the humanities as Jacques-Marie-Émile Lacan was born in Paris on April 13 1901 to a family of solid Catholic tradition, and was educated at a Jesuit school. After completing his baccalauréat he commenced studying medicine and later psychiatry. In 1927, Lacan commenced clinical training and began Lacan’s ‘return to work at psychiatric institutions, meeting and working with (amongst others) the famous psychiatrist Clerambault. His doctoral thesis, on paranoid psychosis, was passed in 1932. In 1934, he became a member meaning of La Societe Psychoanalytique de Paris (SPP), and commenced an analysis lasting until Freud’ not only profoundly changed the outbreak institutional face of the warpsychoanalytic movement internationally. During His seminars in the Nazi occupation 1950’s were one of France, Lacan ceased all official professional activity in protest against those he called "the enemies formative environments of human kind". Following the war, he rejoined the SPP, and it was in the post-war period currency of philosophical ideas that he rose to become a renowned and controversial figure dominated French letters in the international psychoanalytic community, eventually banned in 1962 from the International Psychoanalytic Association for his unorthodox views on the calling and practice of psychoanalysis. Lacan's career as both a theoretician 1960’s and practicioner did not end with this excommunication70’s, however. In 1963, he founded L'Ecole Freudienne de Paris (E.F.P.), a school devoted to the training of analysts and the practicing of psychoanalysis according to Lacanian stipulations. In 1980, having single-handedly dissolved the EFP, he then constituted the Ecole for "La Cause Freudienne", saying: “It is up to you which has come to be Lacanians if you wish; I am Freudian”. Lacan died known in Paris on September 9, 1981. Intellectual Biography Lacan's first major theoretical publication was his piece "On the Mirror Stage Anglophone world as Formative of the I". This piece originally appeared in 1936. Its publication was followed by an extended period wherein he published little. In 1949, though, it was re‘post-presented to wider recognitionstructuralism’. In 1953, on the back of the success of his Rome dissertation to the SPP on "The Function Both inside and Field outside of Speech in Psychoanalysis"France, Lacan then inaugurated the seminar series that he was to continue to convene annually (albeit in different institutional guises) until his death. It was Lacan’s work has also been profoundly important in this forum that he developed and ceaselessly revised the ideas with which his name has become associated. Although Lacan was famously ambivalent about publication, the seminars were transcribed by various fields of his followersaesthetics, literary criticism and several have been translated into Englishfilm theory. Lacan published a selection of his most important essays in 1966 in Through the collection Ecrits. An abridged version work of this text is available in an English-language edition. Althusser (see Bibliographyand more lately Ernesto Laclau, Jannis Stavrokakis and Slavoj Zizek). Theoretical Project Lacan's avowed theoretical intention, from at least 1953Lacanian theory has also left its mark on political theory, was the attempt to reformalise what he termed 'the Freudian field’. His substantial corpus of writings, speeches and seminars can be read as an attempt to unify and reground what are particularly the four interlinking aspirations of Freud's theoretical writings: (1.) a theorisation of psychoanalytic practice as a curative procedure; (2.) the generation of a systematic metapsychology capable analysis of providing the basis for (3.) the formalisation of a diagnostic heuristic of mental illness; ideology and (4institutional reproduction.) the construction of an account This article, which seeks to outline something of the individual philosophical heritage and specie-al development importance of the 'civilised' human psyche. Lacan brought to this projectLacan’s theoretical work, howeveris divided into four parts, a keen knowledge each of the latest developments in the human sciences, drawing especially on structuralist linguistics, the structural anthropology of Claude Levi-Strauss, topology, and game theory. Moreover, as Derrida which has remarked, Lacan's work is characterised by an engagement with modern philosophy (notably Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Heidegger and Sartre) unmatched by other psychoanalytic theorists, especially informed by his attendance at Andre Kojeve's hugely influential Paris lectures on Hegel from 1933-1939subsections.
== def ==
[[Image:Lacan-Roudinesco.gif|thumb|right|Cover of [[Elisabeth Roudinesco]]'s biography of Lacan]]
'''Jacques-Marie-Émile Lacan''' ([[April 13]], [[1901]] – [[September 9]], [[1981]]) was a [[France|French]] [[psychoanalyst]] and [[psychiatrist]]. His work, like most psychoanalytic work, owes a heavy, explicit debt to [[Sigmund Freud]], but also drew from a number of other fields, including linguistics, philosophy, and mathematics. This interdisciplinary focus in his work has led him to be an important figure in many fields beyond psychoanalysis - particularly within [[critical theory]].
Many students of Lacan became important psychoanalysts and/or wrote influential contributions to philosophy and other fields. [[Michel Foucault]], [[Jacques Derrida]], [[Louis Althusser]], [[Jacques-Alain Miller]], [[Luce Irigaray]], [[Jean Laplanche]], and even [[Claude Levi-Strauss]], for example, all attended Lacan's seminars at some point. Lacan's first seminar in 1964 was later published in English as ''[[The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis]]''. Lacan continued to deliver his public exposition of analytic theory and practice for the next seventeen years.
==The 'Return to Freud'==
Following Freud's death, psychoanalytic practice split into many differing schools of thought. Against the backdrop of these divergent currents of psychoanalytic theory, Lacan called for a 'return to Freud'. Lacan accused later psychoanalysts of a superficial understanding of Freud, claiming they had so cautiously adhered to his ideas that they had served to block rather than to induce scientific investigation of the mental process. Lacan wanted to return to Freud's thought, and expand it in light of its own tensions and currents. In fact, near the end of his life he remarked to a conference, "It is up to you to be Lacanians if you wish; I am Freudian."
It should also be emphasised that Lacan insisted that his work was not, in his eyes, an interpretation but a ''translation'' of Freud into structural-linguistic terms. Freud's ideas of 'slips of the tongue', jokes and suchlike – Lacan insisted – all emphasised the agency of language in subjective constitution, such that had Freud lived contemporaneously with [[Claude Lévi-Strauss|Lévi-Strauss]], [[Roland Barthes|Barthes]] and, principally, had Freud been aware of the work of [[Ferdinand de Saussure|Saussure]], he would have done the same as him. In his famous essay, "Freud and Lacan", fellow structuralist [[Louis Althusser]] makes this point particularly well:
<blockquote>"In his first great work ''The Interpretation of Dreams'' […], Freud studied the ‘mechanisms’ and ‘laws’ of dreams, reducing their variants to two: ''displacement'' and ''condensation''. Lacan recognized these as two essential figures of speech, called in linguistics [respectively] metonymy and metaphor. Hence slips, failures, jokes and symptoms, like the elements of dreams themselves, become ''signifiers'', inscribed in the chain of an unconscious discourse, doubling silently, i.e. deafeningly, in the misrecognition of ‘repression’, the chain of the human subject’s verbal discourse. […] Hence the most important acquisitions of de Saussure and of the linguistics that descends from him began to play a justified part in the understanding of the process of the unconscious as well as that of the verbal discourse of the subject and of their inter-relationship, i.e. of their identical relation and non-relation in other words, of their reduplication and dislocation (''décalage'')." (Althusser, ‘Freud and Lacan’ in ''Lenin and Philosophy and other essays'', trans. Ben Brewster (London: New Left Books, 1971), pp. 191 – 192. </blockquote>
The 'return to Freud', therefore, is primarily the realisation that the pervading agency of the unconscious is to be understood as intimately tied to the functions and dynamics of language, where, for example, the signifier is irremediably divorced from the signified, ultimately resulting in Lack. It is here that Lacan began his work on "correcting" Freud from within. As Malcolm Bowie puts it:
<blockquote>"For Lacan, Freud's central insight was not [...] that the unconscious exists, but that it has structure, that this structure affects in innumerable ways what we say and do, and that in thus betraying itself it becomes accessible to analysis". (Malcolm Bowie, 'Jacques Lacan' in John Sturrock (ed.), ''Structuralism and Since: From Lévi-Strauss to Derrida'' (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 118).</blockquote>
(The 'return to Freud' in the full sense of the term, as briefly explained above, begins with his paper ‘The agency of the letter in the unconscious or reason since Freud’ (''Écrits'', pp. 161 - 197).) Lacan's principal challenge to Freudian theory is the privilege that it accords to the ego in self-determination. The central pillar of Jacques Lacan's psychoanalytic theory is that "[[the unconscious is structured like a language]]". The unconscious, he argued, was not a more primitive or archetypal part of the mind separate from the conscious, linguistic ego, but rather, a formation every bit as complex and linguistically sophisticated as consciousness itself. If the unconscious is structured like a language, Lacan argues, then the self is denied any point of reference to which to be 'restored' following trauma or 'identity crisis'. In this way, Lacan's thesis of the structurally dynamic unconscious is also a challenge to the ego psychology that Freud himself opposed.
==Major concepts==
=== The mirror stage (''le stade du miroir'') ===
The [[mirror stage]] is described in Lacan's essay, "The Mirror Stage as formative in the function of the ''I'' as revealed in psychoanalytic experience", the first of his ''Écrits'', which remains one of his seminal papers. Some have crudely put this as the point at which the child 'recognises' him- or herself in the mirror image, but this is unfaithful to what Lacan has in mind and also confuses his terminology. Lacan's emphasis here is on the process of ''identification'' with an outside image or entity induced through, as he puts it, "insufficiency to anticipation – and which manufactures for the subject, caught up in the lure of spatial identification, the succession of phantasies that extends from a fragmented body-image to a form of its totality that I shall call orthopaedic – and, lastly, to the assumption of the armour of an alienating identity, which will mark with its rigid structure the subject’s entire mental development" (Lacan, ''Écrits'' (rvd. edn., 2002), 'The mirror stage', p. 5).
It is significant that this process of identification is the first step towards the manufacture of the subject because all that follows it - the transition into the Imaginary and the Symbolic order - is based on this misrecognition (''méconnaissance''): this is the process that Lacan detects as manifesting itself at every subsequent identification with another person, identity (''not'' to be confused with 'identification') or suchlike throughout the subject's life. This is the start of a lifelong process of identifying the self in terms of the Other. What is also occasionally overlooked is the experiential basis of Lacan's early paper. As one writer has observed: "To evidence concerning the role of the other in childhood – the situation known as "transitivism," for instance, where the child will impute his own actions to another – Lacan adds evidence from animal biology, where it has been experimentally shown that a perceptual relationship to another of the same species is necessary in the normal maturing process. Without the visual presence of others, the maturing process is delayed, although it can be restored to a more nearly normal tempo by placing a mirror in the animal’s cage." ([[Anthony Wilden]], "Lacan and the discourse of the Other" in Lacan, ''The Language of the Self: the Function of Language in Psychoanalysis'', trans. Anthony Wilden (London and Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), pp. 159 – 160.)
===The Other===
In contrast to the dominant Anglo-American [[ego-psychologist]]s of his time, Lacan considered the self as something constituted in the "Other", that is, the conception of the external. Lacan argues that the psychoanalytic movement towards understanding the ego as a coherent force with dominion over a person's psyche was rooted in a misunderstanding of Freud. In Lacan's view, the self remained in eternal internal conflict and that only extensive self-deceit made the situation bearable.
His developmental theory of the objectified self was inspired by [[Ferdinand de Saussure]]'s insights into the relationship of the signifier and the signified - the role of language and reference in thought were central to his formulations, particularly the Symbolic.
===The Real, the Imaginary, and the Symbolic===
Lacan also formulated the concepts of [[the Real]], [[the Imaginary]], and [[the Symbolic]], which he used to describe the elements of the [[psychic structure]]. Lacan's notion of the Real is a very difficult concept which he, in his later years, worked to present in a structured, set-theory fashion, as [[matheme]]s. The Imaginary, or non-linguistic aspect of the psyche, formulates human primitive [[self-knowledge]] while the Symbolic, his term for linguistic collaboration, generates a [[community]]-wide reflection of [[primitive]] self-knowledge and creates the very first set of rules that govern behavior. The Real is the unspeakable reality, always present but continually mediated through the imaginary and the symbolic.
The Imaginary is the realm of spatial identification that begins with the mirror stage (see above), and is instrumental in the development of psychic agency. As discussed, it is here that the emerging subject is able to ''identify'' his or her mirror image as 'self', as distinguished from 'other'. However, this process entails a certain structural alienation in that what is designated as 'self' is ''formed through'' what is Other – namely, the mirror image. What becomes the Subject proper is made through inception into the Symbolic order, which is when the infant acquires the ability to use language – that is, to realise his or her desire through speech.
===Other important concepts===
* [[The Name of the Father]]
*Oedipal drama and the Oedipal signification
* [[Objet Petit a]]
* [[Signifier]]/ [[Signified]]
*Desire
*The Drive
*[[Jouissance]]
*The [[Phallus]]
*Das Ding
* the [[gaze]]
* the [[four discourses]]
* the [[graph of desire]]
* the [[Borromean clinic]]
* [[Anamorphism| Anamorphosis]]
==Writings and seminars==
