Jacques Lacan

Jacques Lacan

Jacques-Marie Émile Lacan [April 13, 1901 – September 9, 1981] was a French psychiatrist and psychoanalyst.

He is one of the most important -- and most controversial -- figures in the history of psychoanalysis, but is also acknowledged for his influence across a wide range of disciplines in the humanities and the social sciences.

Biography

Click here for a more complete chronology of Jacques Lacan's life.

In 1927, Lacan begins his clincial training in psychiatry at the Sainte-Anne hospital, where he would later teach.

In 1932, Lacan completes his doctoral thesis -- De la psychose paranoiaque dans ses rapports avec la personalité ("On Paranoid Psychosis and Its Relations to the Personality").

In 1936, Lacan presents his paper on the mirror stage at a conference of the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA) in Marienbad.

In 1953, Lacan begins his first public seminar in Hôpital Sainte-Anne.

In 1938, Lacan becomes a member of the Société psychanalytique de Paris (SPP), a member body of the IPA.

In 1953, Lacan is elected president of the SPP. However, six months later he resigns from the SPP to join the Société Française de Psychanalyse (SFP) with Daniel Lagache and Francoise Dolto among others.

From 1954 to 1963, after a series of requests and a lengthy committee investigation, the SFP is granted IPA affiliation as a member society on condition that Lacan be removed from the list of training analysts.

In 1963, Lacan resigns from the SFP and founds his own school, the École Freudienne de Paris (EFP).

In 1980, Lacan dissolves the EFP and creates in its stead the Cause freudienne.

In 1981, the Cause freudienne is dissolved and the École de la Cause freudienne is created to replace it.

Development

Lacan's work has transformed psychoanalysis, both as a theory and as a practice.

In the 1950s, Lacan emphasized the role of language (and the symbolic order) in psychoanalysis and formulated his most important thesis: that the unconscious is structured like a language.

(This was an extraordinarily innovative period for Lacan and he introduced many of the concepts that would preoccupy him for the rest of his career.)

Structuralism

Lacan drew on a field of study known as Structuralism and on linguistic theory.

Claude Lévi-Strauss's elementary structure of kinship provided the basis for Lacan's conception of the symbolic order and the formation of the unconscious.

Lévi-Strauss's structural anthropology was facilitated by the work of the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913) and it was through Lévi-Strauss that Lacan began to read linguistics.

In the process he made radical and far-reaching changes to Saussure's concept of the linguistic sign, completely reversing any conventional understanding of the relationship between the speaking subject and language.

Finally, we will look at the Russian linguist Roman Jakobson's (1896-1982) work on metaphor and metonymy, as this was crucially important for Lacan's conceptualization of desire.

Lacan's conception of the subject as constituted in and through language.

Bibliography

Click here for a more complete bibliography of Jacques Lacan's work.

Lacan's most important theoretical contributions to psychoanalysis were presented in his seminars.

In 1966, a selection of Lacan's most important papers are published under the title Écrits; fewer than one-third of them are included in the English Écrits: A Selection (1977).

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