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* [[Jacques-Marie Emile Lacan]] is born in Paris, the first child (eldest son) of (prosperous, bourgeois parents) Alfred Lacan (1873-1960) and Emilie Baudry (1876-1948), a middle-class Roman-Catholic family.
* 13 April Birth of Jacques-Marie Emile Lacan, the first child of Alfred Lacan (1873–1960) and Emilie Baudry (1876–1948). The middle-class Roman Catholic family has settled at 95 boulevard Beaumarchais in Paris. The father is overseeing a prosperous food business that his family started a century earlier with a reputed vinegar company, expanding later into the commerce of pickled goods, mustard, brandy, rum, and coffee.
* April 14 - Jacques Lacan born in Paris (France)
;1902
* November Lacan obtains his doctor’s title with a thesis on paranoia. His dissertation is published by Le François and Lacan sends a copy to Freud, who acknowledges receipt by postcard.
* Publication of Lacan's translation of Freud's “Some neurotic mechanisms in jealousy, paranoia and homosexuality” for the Revue française de psychanalyse. June Lacan begins his analysis with Rudolph Loewenstein. November Lacan defends his thesis on paranoia, published as De la psychose paranoïaque dans ses rapports avec la personnalité (Paris: Le François, 1932).
* September 7 - Date of the medical thesis presented by Jacques Lacan De la psychose paranoïaque dans ses rapports à la personnalité (Of paranoid psychosis in its relationship to personality) (France)
* 26 September In his “Rome discourse, ” Lacan presents “Function and field of speech and language in psychoanalysis” (E/S, pp. 30–113, original talk in AE, pp. 133–64), a veritable manifesto. In this pyrotechnical display showing all the facets of his culture, Lacan introduces the doctrine of the signifier. Among many crucial theoretical pronouncements, the “Rome discourse” justifies the practice of the variable-length session. Françoise Dolto speaks after Lacan and Lagache and expresses her support for the new movement.
* 18 November Lacan starts his public seminar at Sainte-Anne hospital with a close reading of Freud's papers on technique (later S I). He also conducts weekly clinical presentations of patients.
* September 26-27 - Following the 16th Conference of Romance Language Psychoanalysts, Jacques Lacan gives his "Rome Report": "Function and Range of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis" (France)
* January Lacan starts his seminar at the Ecole normale supérieure, rue d'Ulm, under the administrative control of the Ecole pratique des hautesétudes. Claude Lévi-Strauss and Louis Althusser have intervened on his behalf to secure the room. This seminar, devoted to the Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, finds a broader and more philosophical audience.
* June Lacan founds the Ecole française de psychanalyse. His “Act of foundation” dramatizes his sense of heroic solitude (“I hereby found – as alone as I have always been in my relation to the psychoanalytic cause – the Ecole française de psychanalyse, whose direction, concerning which nothing at present prevents me from answering for, I shall undertake during the next four years to assure”). Three months later it changes its name to the Ecole freudienne de Paris. Lacan launches a new associative model for his school; study groups called “cartels, ” made up of four or five people, are constituted, including one person who reports on the progress of the group.
* June 21 - Jacques Lacan founds theÉcole Française de Psychanalyse (French School of Psychoanalysis), which will be renamedÉcole freudienne de Paris (Freudian School of Paris) in September 1964
* 18–21 October Lacan attends an international symposium entitled “The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man” at Johns Hopkins University. He participates actively in the debate on Structuralism and presents his paper “Of structure as an inmixing of an Otherness prerequisite to any subject whatever.” In a text as dense as its title, Lacan quotes Frege and Russell, explaining that his motto that the unconscious is “structured as a language” is in fact a tautology, since “structured” and “as a language” are synonymous. He states memorably: “The best image to sum up the unconscious is Baltimore in the early morning.”
* November Publication of Ecrits. Surprisingly, the thick (924 pages) book sells very well. December Marriage of Judith Lacan and Jacques-Alain Miller.
* Écrits by Jacques Lacan published (France)
* 9 October Lacan proposes the procedure of the pass as a means to verify the end of analysis and to recruit new ‘analysts of the school’.
* 9 October Lacan launches the new procedure of the “pass” (la passe) as a final examination allowing one to become a training analyst in his school.
* October 9 - Jacques Lacan proposes under the name "la passe" an enabling process adapted to the Freudian School of Paris (France)
(1981) and Schneiderman (1983).
Biographical sketch 11
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.
[[Category:Psychoanalysis]]
[[Category:Jacques Lacan]]
