Background

Jacques Marie Émile Lacan was born on April 13, 1901, in Paris, Ile-de-France, France to the family of Charles Marie Alfred Lacan and Émilie Philippine Marie Baudry. Lacan's father was the Paris soap and oils sales representative of a large provincial firm. The family lived in comfortable conditions in the Boulevard du Beaumarchais before moving to the Montparnasse area.

Education

Jacques Lacan was educated at a Jesuit school Collège Stanislas. After completing the school he commenced studying medicine and later psychiatry. In 1927, Lacan commenced clinical training and began to work at psychiatric institutions, meeting and working with (amongst others) the famous psychiatrist Gaetan Gatian de Clerambault. His doctoral thesis, on paranoid psychosis, was passed in 1932. Beginning in the 1920s, Lacan undertook his own analysis with psychoanalyst Rudolph Loewenstein which was also a part of his psychoanalytic training and which continued until 1938.

Career

In 1931, Lacan received his license as a forensic psychiatrist, and in 1932 was awarded the Doctorat d'état for his thesis, De la Psychose paranoiaque dans les rapports avec la personnalité, about a young woman's paranoid identification with a famous stage actress. While this thesis drew considerable acclaim outside psychoanalytic circles, particularly among the surrealist artists, it seems to have been ignored by psychoanalysts. But in 1934 he became a candidate for the Société Psychanalytique de Paris. During this period he is said to have befriended the surrealists André Breton and Georges Bataille.

Because Lacan, like Sigmund Freud, apparently destroyed most of the records of his past, and unlike Freud did not reveal much of it later on, it is difficult to distinguish between the many myths, anecdotes, and rumors that have surrounded him. There are, for instance, many contradictory tales about his romantic life with Sylvia Bataille in southern France during World War II and of his attachment to her daughter, Laurance. He married Sylvia in 1953 and had another daughter, Judith.

In any case, it is clear that Lacan was very active in the world of Parisian writers, artists and intellectuals during the prewar period. In addition to Breton and Bataille, he was also associated with Salvador Dalí, Pablo Picasso, and Philippe Sollers. He attended the movement Psyché founded by Maryse Choisy. Several of his articles were published in the Surrealist journal Minotaure, and he was present at the first public reading of James Joyce’s Ulysses.

Lacan presented his first analytic paper on the "Mirror Phase" at the 1936 Congress of the International Psychoanalytical Association in Marienbad. He was called up to serve in the French army after the German occupation of France and was posted to the Val-de-Grâce military hospital in Paris. After the war, Lacan visited England for a five-week study trip, meeting English analysts Wilfred Bion and John Rickman. He was much influenced by Bion’s analytic work with groups and this contributed to his own later emphasis on study groups (in France, cartels) as a structure with which to advance theoretical work in psychoanalysis.

Also in 1953, Lacan conducted his first annual seminar addressing Freud’s Papers on Technique (1953-1954). Lacan continued giving these right up until shortly before his death, with le Séminaire running continuously for twenty-seven years. As was the case with Kojève, Lacan exerted his influence primarily through his oral teachings. The first decade of le Séminaire (1953–1963) was taught at the Hôpital Sainte-Anne and had an audience consisting mostly of psychoanalysts. In 1964, he moved his seminar first to the École Normale Supérieure (1964–1969) and then to the Faculty of Law across from the Panthéon (1969–1980). From 1964 onwards, Lacan’s audience startlingly increased in both sheer numbers and breadth of backgrounds, with artists and academics from various disciplines across academia joining the more clinically-minded attendees. Le Séminaire became a nodal Parisian intellectual institution, a kind of hub attracting some of the brightest stars of the post-War French cultural firmament. For instance, such philosophers as Jean Hyppolite, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Luce Irigaray, and Julia Kristeva spent time in Lacan’s audience. In his seminars, Lacan deftly maneuvered within and between a multitude of theoretical currents, putting psychoanalysis into conversation with the history of philosophy, phenomenology, existentialism, structuralism, post-structuralism, feminism, and, as already indicated, just about every discipline represented in the university. All of the major French philosophers of the generation that came of age in the 1960s and 1970s engaged with Freudian analysis in one way or another, and all of them did so in fashions varyingly informed by Lacan’s teachings.

In 1966, Lacan’s hulking tome Écrits was published by Éditions du Seuil. Prior to this, Lacan had published only a single book, his thesis in psychiatry (1932). The nine-hundred-page Écrits gathered together many of Lacan’s most important articles and essays into a single volume, covering a thirty-year stretch from 1936 to 1966. These "writings" provide very daunting and demanding paths of entry into Lacanian thinking (the annual seminars are comparatively more reader-friendly and transparent). Although the Écrits bear no small portion of responsibility for Lacan’s reputation as a "difficult" (if not deliberately obscurantist) thinker, this book became a bestseller upon its initial release in France. Its success elevated Lacan into his fame as the French Freud in the eyes of France’s reading public. During this time, Lacan’s audience for le Séminaire continued to swell, with his influence growing to cover ever-wider circles of Paris-centered intellectual and cultural life.

In 1980, near the end of his life, Lacan saw fit to disband his school, the École freudienne. This decision was controversial and triggered factional infighting amongst his followers. Lacan died in 1981.

Achievements

• Lacan's ‘return to the meaning of Freud’ profoundly changed the institutional face of the psychoanalytic movement internationally. The Seminars of Jacques Lacan, which started in 1953 and lasted until his death in 1980, were one of the formative environments of the currency of philosophical ideas that dominated French letters in the 1960s and 1970s, and which has come to be known in the Anglophone world as post-structuralism, though it would be a mischaracterization to label Lacan as only a post-structuralist. This entailed a renewed concentration upon the Freudian concepts of the unconscious, the castration complex, the ego conceptualized as a mosaic of identifications, and the centrality of language to any psychoanalytic work. His work has a strong interdisciplinary focus, drawing particularly on linguistics, philosophy, and mathematics, and he has become an important figure in many fields beyond psychoanalysis, particularly within critical theory, and can be regarded as an important figure of twentieth-century French philosophy.
  
  Lacan's work has had a profound impact on the development of psychoanalysis worldwide. Within the Lacanian community itself, a number of different schools have emerged, particularly in France, Spain, and England, though the vast majority of practitioners are under the auspices of the World Association of Psychoanalysis (WAP), headed by Jacques-Alain Miller, Lacan's son-in-law. Outside Europe, Lacanian psychoanalysis has gained particular prominence in the United States, Brazil, and Argentina.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Ecrits

    (Brilliant and innovative, Jacques Lacan's work lies at th...)

    1966
  • The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book 2: The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954-1955

    (A complete translation of the seminar that Jacques Lacan ...)

    1978
  • The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book 1: Freud's Papers on Technique, 1953-1954

    (A complete translation of the seminar that Jacques Lacan ...)

    1975
  • The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book 6: Desire and its Interpretation

    (What does Lacan show us? He shows us that desire is not a...)

    2013
  • The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book 3: The Psychoses

    (Sometimes controversial, invariably fascinating, Lacan's ...)

    1981
  • The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book 17: The Other Side of Psychoanalysis

    (Revolutionary and innovative, Lacan's work lies at the ep...)

    1991
  • The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book 10: Anxiety

    (Jacques Lacan is widely recognized as a key figure in the...)

    2004
  • The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book 7: The Ethics Of Psychoanalysis

    (One of the most influential French intellectuals of this ...)

    1998
  • The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book 20: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge

    (A startling psycholinguistic exploration of the boundarie...)

    1975
  • The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book 19: ...or Worse

    (A chance meeting of a sewing machine and an umbrella. The...)

    2011
  • De la Psychose paranoïaque dans ses rapports avec la personnalité suivi de Premiers écrits sur la paranoïa 1932
  • The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book 4: The Object Relation 1994
  • The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book 5: Formations of the Unconscious 1998
  • The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book 8: Transference 1986
  • The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book 11: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis 1973
  • The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book 15: L'Acte psychanalytique 1968
  • The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book 16: D'un Autre à l'autre 2006
  • The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book 18: D'un discours qui ne serait pas du semblant 2006
  • The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book 23: The Sinthome 2005

Religion

Jacques Lacan considered himself an atheist, having renounced the Catholic religion of his parents. Like Freud, he opposed religion to science and aligns psychoanalysis with the latter. Lacan stated that the true formula of atheism is not God is dead but God is unconscious.

Politics

Lacan was associated, at least in the public mind, with the far left in France. In 1968, he showed his sympathy for the student protests. However, Lacan's unequivocal comments in 1971 on revolutionary ideals in politics draw a sharp line between the actions of some of his followers and his own style of "revolt"

Lacanian psychoanalysis has a tense relationship with political philosophy. The Lacanian world of desire, fantasy, jouissance, and the Real can appear quite divorced from contemporary politics. Indeed, Jacques Lacan himself was skeptical about the relationship between psychoanalysis and politics. This unease continues amongst contemporary readers of Lacan. Many regard Lacanian philosophy to be inherently conservative and nihilistic, based as it is on a fundamental lack which constitutes the impossibility of society and thus utopian politics. This impossibility has led some theorists, such as Elizabeth Bellamy, to suggest that psychoanalysis and politics do not mix. However, although Lacan established his system of thought - following Sigmund Freud - primarily for application in the clinical field, through the work of Slavoj Žižek in particular Lacanian theory has become a vastly popular tool for the analysis of socio-political formations.

Views

Lacan's theory of the mirror stage is his first original contribution to psychoanalytic thinking. This theory was first formulated at a conference in Marienbad in 1936. Although it is a reformulation of Freud's theory of narcissism, it has important consequences for the philosophical reflection on the status of the subject. Indeed, according to Lacan, the ego is an effect of an identification with an image (paradigmatically the mirror image) that represents an ideal of unity and completeness and that is not the ego itself: "Je est un autre." The ego is thus characterized by an alienation that cannot be undone. It gains access to itself only through the image of the other. In the mirror stage - and in all "imaginary" relations that function according to the same logic - the ego misrecognizes its difference from the image/ideal with which it identifies itself and of which it believes that it expresses its very essence.

Lacan's work of the 1930s and 1940s mainly consists of a detailed exploration of the characteristics and the dynamics of the mirror stage and the realm of the imaginary that is characterized by it. In this context, he specifically focuses on typical forms of human aggression. Human aggression is not primarily an effect of the frustration of vital needs. Indeed, since the ego structurally misrecognizes its difference from the image/ideal of the other with which it identifies itself, the latter also inevitably appears as a usurper that provokes aggressiveness. S/he indeed appears in the process at a place that seems to be rightfully mine. I desire what s/he desires because, on the basis of the identification, I am what s/he is. As a consequence, this desire is intrinsically conflictual. Lacan often refers in this context to Saint Augustine, who describes a scene in which a well-fed infant expresses uncontrollable anger at the sight of his baby brother being breastfed. This is a clear illustration of one of the meanings of Lacan's famous dictum that "desire is the desire of the other."

This intrinsic link between the mirror stage and human aggression explains why Lacan thinks of the former as an impasse that has to be overcome. The emergence of structuralism in the early fifties, and more particularly the publication of Levi-Strauss's The Elementary Structures of Kinship in 1949, allowed Lacan to explain once and for all how overcoming this impasse is possible. He now claimed that the symbolic order - the order of language and of the law - precedes and dominates the imaginary that is structured by it. Hence, the identification with the mirror image is only possible on the basis of a symbolic point of reference: "Look, that image in the mirror, that is little Jimmy."

Whereas in the thirties and forties Lacan mainly studied the dynamics of imaginary relations, during the fifties he focused on the relation between human beings and the symbolic order that he calls "the Other." Lacan turns to Hegel's idea that "the word is the murder of the thing." Entry into the symbolic order implies a loss of immediacy that desire tries to undo. This desire is essentially dependent on the symbolic order through which it takes shape. Humans desire in accordance with the symbolic systems in which they are born. Lacan shows, for instance, how the inability to write of one of his patients was linked to his youth in a Muslim country. When he was small, his father was accused of theft and, according to Islamic law, the hands of a thief should be cut off. This illustrates the second meaning of Lacan's dictum, "Desire is the desire of the Other." Here "the Other" indeed refers to the symbolic system - in the case of Lacan's patient: Islamic law - in which the subject participates without realizing its impact.

In the early 1960s, Lacan shifted his attention from the imaginary and the symbolic to the Real and the object a. Language consists, according to Lacan, of differentially determined signifiers whose meaning is completely dependent on the context in which they are used. Because there is no ultimate context that would end the production of meaning once and for all, the loss of immediacy can never be overcome or "sublated" in an ultimate synthesis. Something is irremediably lost and cannot be recuperated into the order of meaning (the imaginary and the symbolic). This is what Lacan calls the Real. This notion is intrinsically linked to Lacan's theory of the object a that is the cause (and not the telos) of desire. Examples of objects a include Freudian part-objects such as breast and feces as well as the voice and the gaze, which are paradigmatic examples of the object a, according to Lacan. The object a is a (dis)incarnation of the lack that causes desire: it gives the lack a bodily determination, on the one hand; at the same time, however, these objects cannot be grasped in the phenomenal world. In this way, they refer to the infinite character of human desire.

From the early 1960s onward, Lacan became more and more interested in topological figures like Borommean knots or rings. He believed that they could be used to articulate the fundamental structures of human subjectivity.

Quotations: "The unconscious is structured like a language."

"There’s a lot psychoanalysis can do, but it’s powerless against stupidity."

"The man who is born into existence deals first with language; this is a given. He is even caught in it before his birth."

"Nature provides-I must use the word- signifies, and these signifies organize human relation in a creative way, providing them with structures and shaping them."

"There are thoughts in this field of the beyond of consciousness, and it is impossible to represent these thoughts other than in the same homology of determination in which the subject of the I think finds himself in relation to the articulation of the I doubt."

Membership

In 1934 Jaques Lacan became a candidate for the Société Parisienne de Psychanalyse (SPP) becoming a full member in 1938. It was a member body of the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA). In 1953, after a short Presidentship and a disagreement about analytic practice methods, Lacan and many of his colleagues left the SPP to form a new group the Société Française de Psychanalyse (SFP). He dissolved the SFP in 1965 having a disagreement with his old followers and having created a new learned society École Freudienne de Paris (EFP) in 1964.

• 

  Part of the International Psychoanalytical Association

  Société Psychanalytique de Paris , France

  1938 - 1953

• Société Française de Psychanalyse , France

  1953 - 1965

• École Freudienne de Paris , France

  1964 - 1981

Personality

In Lacan's biography, Élisabeth Roudinesco describes him as a “temperamental child,” a man who'd often demand his preferred variety of liquor, cigar, or food at the click of his fingers, wherever he was.

Lacan’s casual relationship with theft is also documented. After poring through her archives of Lacan’s letters, Roudinesco discovered that Lacan would often write to friends to either borrow or purchase books that were rare and collectible. When asked to return them, they were often "lost," and in the case of purchasing them he rarely shelled out the full agreed-to amount.

It is also connected with a case of Aimée (a pseudonym for Marguerite Anzieu), Lacan’s patient and the subject of his now-famous 1932 doctoral thesis. Aimée was jailed and put under Lacan’s ward after she tried to stab famous French actress Huguette Duflos. Aimée was described as paranoid and delusional, but Lacan was fascinated by the novel she was writing while under his care. Even Aimée couldn’t escape his avarice, as Lacan “borrowed” the novel’s manuscripts for his own scholarly work. To this day, the descendants of Aimée are trying to recover the manuscripts.

More serious are accusations of plagiarism. Lacan is famously known for positing the "mirror stage," a psychoanalytic term for the point in life at which infants can recognize themselves in mirrors. However, not unlike his book collection, it was stolen from somebody else. Roudinesco notes that the term comes from a Communist psychologist named Henri Wallon, and that Lacan - ever "quick to erase the original archive" - "always suppressed Wallon’s name."

Another great Lacan scam was his "variable-length session," a fancy way to justify bilking his therapy patients out of money. Throughout his life, Lacan slowly decreased the time he spent with each patient; what began as nearly an hour of psychoanalysis later dwindled to only a few minutes, and cost a bundle. And, if you were an aspiring student of Lacan, you too were required to pay to get on his couch.

Lacan enjoyed the stereotypically French finer things in life - food, alcohol, women, and art. He liked extravagant clothing "made in accordance with his instructions: furs, suits in unusual materials, hard collars without flaps or collars twisted and turned up, lavallières of various sizes, made-to-measure shoes in rare skins, gold pieces, ingots," Roudinesco notes.

Roudinesco also describes Lacan as a "fetishistic" collector who kept detailed lists of all of his possessions. Besides his partially-stolen collection of rare and original books, he also owned various works of fine art, like L’Origine du Monde, which was craftily covered by Sylvia Bataille with a painted panel that Lacan used to like to slide back for his friends - revealing the origin of the world like a teenager reveals their porn stash. "The phallus is in the painting," Lacan liked to declare.

One of Lacan's students happened to be Felix Guattari, who, with French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, would eventually become famous as of Lacan’s greatest critics. Guattari was originally part of the Lacanian cult, a star student who paid for the privilege of driving Lacan home after his seminar. It was, Lacan argued, a part of the psychoanalysis.

However, when Guattari met with Lacan for dinner and explained his forthcoming book, Anti-Oedipus (a lengthy screed against Freudian and Lacanian thinking), Lacan broke off all contact with Guattari, and started spreading rumors to his friends to ruin his former disciple's career. (He also banned his students from discussing Guattari's book, as a biography of the duo notes.)

Lacan’s friends weren’t immune to his self-centered desires. While his wife assumed she was in a monogamous marriage, Lacan was out philandering with famous French actresses. One of those actresses was Sylvia Bataille, and if the name sounds familiar it’s because she was married to the esteemed writer, and friend of Lacan, Georges Bataille. To Lacan’s credit, the two were separated before Lacan’s "intervention." Against Lacan’s credit, he concealed the existence of the daughter he fathered with Sylvia to his other children.

Lacan had a twisted sense of humor; he named his beloved dog Justine, after the eponymous sex slave of the Marquis de Sade book.

Physical Characteristics: Lacan suffered from colon cancer which became a cause of his death in 1981.

Quotes from others about the person

• "Lacan's most widely quoted maxim is, "The unconscious is structured like a language," and like that sentence, Lacan's whole oeuvre rests on a certain idea of language. His proclaimed "return to Freud" meant remedying Freud's failure to use "modern" linguistics. "Modern" linguistics for Lacan, however, means turn-of-the-century linguistics - specifically, Ferdinand de Saussure's. The trouble is that very little of Saussure's linguistics stands up today, after nearly a century's work in linguistics. In writing this essay, for example, I had trouble finding linguistic texts that even refer to Saussure. Saussure's views are not held, so far as I know, by modern linguists, only by literary critics, Lacanians, and the occasional philosopher." - Norman N. Holland, American literary critic
  
  "Lacan, Derrida, and Foucault are the perfect prophets for the weak, anxious academic personality, trapped in verbal formulas and perennially defeated by circumstances. They offer a self-exculpating cosmic explanation for the normal professorial state of resentment, alienation, dithering passivity and inaction." - Camille Paglia, American author, scholar, feminist and critic
  
  "Quite frankly I thought he was a total charlatan. He was just posturing for the television cameras in the way many Paris intellectuals do. Why this is influential, I haven’t the slightest idea. I don’t see anything there that should be influential." - Noam Chomsky, American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, historian, social critic, and political activist

Interests

• topology

• Philosophers & Thinkers

  Sigmund Freud, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Alexandre Kojève, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Georges Bataille, Alexandre Kojève

• Politicians

  Karl Marx

• Writers

  James Joyce, Charles Maurras

• Artists

  Gustave Courbet, Salvador Dalí

• Sport & Clubs

  soccer, FC Metz

• Music & Bands

  Carlo Gesualdo

Connections

In 1934, Lacan married Marie-Louise Blondin, the sister of his friend the surgeon Sylvain Blondin. Three children were born from this marriage, Caroline in 1934, Thibaut in 1939, and Sibylle in 1940. On 3 July 1941, Judith Bataille, the daughter of Lacan and Sylvia Maklès-Bataille, is born. Judith receives the surname Bataille because Lacan is still married to Marie-Louise. On 15 December 1941, Lacan and Marie-Louise Blondin are officially divorced. In 1953, Sylvia Maklès-Bataille becomes Lacan's second wife.

Father:

Charles Marie Alfred Lacan

Mother:

Émilie Philippine Marie Baudry

ex-wife:

Marie-Louise Blondin

Daughter:

Caroline Lacan

Son:

Thibaut Lacan

Daughter:

Sibylle Lacan

Daughter:

Judith Miller

Wife:

Sylvia Bataille

son-in-law:

Jacques-Alain Miller

Jacques-Alain Miller is a psychoanalyst and writer. He is the sole editor of the books of The Seminars of Jacques Lacan.

Friend:

Salvador Dali

Acquaintance:

Pablo Picasso

Acquaintance:

Noam Chomsky

Analyst:

Rudolph Loewenstein

mentor:

Henri Claude

mentor:

Gaëtan Gatian de Clérambault

Acquaintance:

Martin Heidegger

References

• Lacan: A Beginner's Guide
  2009
• Jacques Lacan: The Death of an Intellectual Hero
  1984
• How to Read Lacan
  2007
• Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism
  2000
• Lacan To The Letter: Reading Ecrits Closely
  2004
• Five Lessons on the Psychoanalytic Theory of Jacques Lacan
  1998
• Lacan and the Formulae of Sexuation
  2019
• Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture
  1992
• Lacan and Addiction
  2011
• Conversations with Lacan: Seven Lectures for Understanding Lacan
  2019
• Lacan the Charlatan
  2020
• Fashionable Nonsense
  1999