56 Facts About Jacques Lacan

Jacques Marie Emile Lacan was a French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist.

Jacques Lacan's work made a significant impact on continental philosophy and cultural theory in areas such as post-structuralism, critical theory, feminist theory and film theory, as well as on the practice of psychoanalysis itself.

Jacques Lacan took up and discussed the whole range of Freudian concepts, emphasizing the philosophical dimension of Freud's thought and applying concepts derived from structuralism in linguistics and anthropology to its development in his own work, which he would further augment by employing formulae from predicate logic and topology.

In consequence, Jacques Lacan went on to establish new psychoanalytic institutions to promote and develop his work, which he declared to be a "return to Freud", in opposition to prevalent trends in psychology and institutional psychoanalysis collusive of adaptation to social norms.

Jacques Lacan was born in Paris, the eldest of Emilie and Alfred Jacques Lacan's three children.

Jacques Lacan's father was a successful soap and oils salesman.

Jacques Lacan had meetings with Charles Maurras, whom he admired as a literary stylist, and he occasionally attended meetings of Action Francaise, of which he would later be highly critical.

In 1920, after being rejected for military service on the grounds that he was too thin, Jacques Lacan entered medical school.

Jacques Lacan was involved with the Parisian surrealist movement of the 1930s, associating with Andre Breton, Georges Bataille, Salvador Dali, and Pablo Picasso.

Jacques Lacan attended the mouvement Psyche that Maryse Choisy founded and published in the Surrealist journal Minotaure.

In 1931, after a second year at the Sainte-Anne Hospital, Jacques Lacan was awarded his Diplome de medecin legiste and became a licensed forensic psychiatrist.

Jacques Lacan's thesis was based on observations of several patients with a primary focus on one female patient whom he called Aimee.

Also in 1932, Jacques Lacan published a translation of Freud's 1922 text, "Uber einige neurotische Mechanismen bei Eifersucht, Paranoia und Homosexualitat" as "De quelques mecanismes nevrotiques dans la jalousie, la paranoia et l'homosexualite" in the Revue francaise de psychanalyse.

In 1934 Jacques Lacan became a candidate member of the Societe psychanalytique de Paris.

Jacques Lacan began his private psychoanalytic practice in 1936 whilst still seeing patients at the Sainte-Anne Hospital, and the same year presented his first analytic report at the Congress of the International Psychoanalytical Association in Marienbad on the "Mirror Phase".

The congress chairman, Ernest Jones, terminated the lecture before its conclusion, since he was unwilling to extend Jacques Lacan's stated presentation time.

Insulted, Jacques Lacan left the congress to witness the Berlin Olympic Games.

Jacques Lacan married Marie-Louise Blondin in January 1934 and in January 1937 they had the first of their three children, a daughter named Caroline.

Jacques Lacan was called up for military service which he undertook in periods of duty at the Val-de-Grace military hospital in Paris, whilst at the same time continuing his private psychoanalytic practice.

Jacques Lacan intervened personally with the authorities to obtain papers detailing her family origins, which he destroyed.

Jacques Lacan kept the name Bataille because Lacan wished to delay the announcement of his planned separation and divorce until after the war.

In 1945 Jacques Lacan visited England for a five-week study trip, where he met the British analysts Ernest Jones, Wilfred Bion and John Rickman.

Bion's analytic work with groups influenced Jacques Lacan, contributing to his own subsequent emphasis on study groups as a structure within which to advance theoretical work in psychoanalysis.

In 1951, Jacques Lacan started to hold a private weekly seminar in Paris in which he inaugurated what he described as "a return to Freud," whose doctrines were to be re-articulated through a reading of Saussure's linguistics and Levi-Strauss's structuralist anthropology.

In January 1953 Jacques Lacan was elected president of the SPP.

Jacques Lacan started with a seminar on The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis in January 1964 in the Dussane room at the Ecole Normale Superieure.

Jacques Lacan began to set forth his own approach to psychoanalysis to an audience of colleagues that had joined him from the SFP.

Jacques Lacan's lectures attracted many of the Ecole Normale's students.

In May 1968, Jacques Lacan voiced his sympathy for the student protests and as a corollary his followers set up a Department of Psychology at the University of Vincennes.

In 1969, Jacques Lacan moved his public seminars to the Faculte de Droit, where he continued to deliver his expositions of analytic theory and practice until the dissolution of his school in 1980.

Jacques Lacan gave lectures in 1975 at Yale, Columbia and MIT.

Jacques Lacan's failing health made it difficult for him to meet the demands of the year-long Seminars he had been delivering since the fifties, but his teaching continued into the first year of the eighties.

Jacques Lacan's "return to Freud" emphasizes a renewed attention to the original texts of Freud, and included a radical critique of ego psychology, whereas "Jacques Lacan's quarrel with Object Relations psychoanalysis" was a more muted affair.

Jacques Lacan thought that Freud's ideas of "slips of the tongue", jokes, and the interpretation of dreams all emphasized the agency of language in subjects' own constitution of themselves.

Jacques Lacan is associated with the idea that "the unconscious is structured like a language", but the first time this sentence occurs in his work, he clarifies that he means that both the unconscious and language are structured, not that they share a single structure; and that the structure of language is such that the subject cannot necessarily be equated with the speaker.

Jacques Lacan calls the specular image "orthopaedic", since it leads the child to anticipate the overcoming of its "real specific prematurity of birth".

When conceiving the other as a place, Jacques Lacan refers to Freud's concept of psychical locality, in which the unconscious is described as "the other scene".

Jacques Lacan considered psychic functions to occur within a universal matrix.

Jacques Lacan refined the concept of the orders over decades, resulting in inconsistencies in his writings.

Jacques Lacan thought that the relationship created within the mirror stage between the ego and the reflected image means that the ego and the Imaginary order itself are places of radical alienation: "alienation is constitutive of the Imaginary order".

Insofar as identification with the analyst is the objective of analysis, Jacques Lacan accused major psychoanalytic schools of reducing the practice of psychoanalysis to the Imaginary order.

Jacques Lacan returned to the theme of the Real in 1953 and continued to develop it until his death.

In Seminar XI Jacques Lacan defines the Real as "the impossible" because it is impossible to imagine, impossible to integrate into the Symbolic, and impossible to attain.

Jacques Lacan redefines the psychoanalytic symptom in terms of his topology of the subject.

Jacques Lacan goes from conceiving the symptom as a message which can be deciphered by reference to the unconscious structured like a language to seeing it as the trace of the particular modality of the subject's jouissance.

Jacques Lacan's desire refers always to unconscious desire because it is unconscious desire that forms the central concern of psychoanalysis.

Jacques Lacan maintains Freud's distinction between drive and instinct.

Jacques Lacan posits drives as both cultural and symbolic constructs: to him, "the drive is not a given, something archaic, primordial".

Jacques Lacan retains Freud's dualism, but in terms of an opposition between the symbolic and the imaginary and not referred to different kinds of drives.

Jacques Lacan's ideas had a significant impact on post-structuralism, critical theory, 20th-century French philosophy, film theory, and clinical psychoanalysis.

Francois Roustang called it an "incoherent system of pseudo-scientific gibberish", and quoted linguist Noam Chomsky's opinion that Jacques Lacan was an "amusing and perfectly self-conscious charlatan".

Eclectic in his use of sources, Jacques Lacan has been seen as concealing his own thought behind the apparent explication of that of others.

Bowie has suggested that Jacques Lacan suffered from both a love of system and a deep-seated opposition to all forms of system.

Philosopher and psychoanalyst Luce Irigaray accuses Jacques Lacan of perpetuating phallocentric mastery in philosophical and psychoanalytic discourse.

Claims surrounding misogynistic tendencies were further fueled when his wife Sylvia Jacques Lacan referred to her late husband as a "domestic tyrant" during a series of interviews conducted by anthropologist Jamer Hunt.

Jacques Lacan was just posturing for the television cameras in the way many Paris intellectuals do.