Jacques Lacan

Jacques-Marie-Émile Lacan was born on 13 April 1901 in Paris to a Catholic bourgeois family that ran a successful soap and oil firm. Educated at the Collège Stanislas, he read Aristotle and Spinoza on his own as a teenager before entering medicine at the University of Paris. By his mid-twenties he was studying neuropsychiatry under Henri Claude, and in 1928 he joined the police forensic service as a junior assistant to the psychiatrist Gaétan de Clérambault, immersing himself in the criminal psychiatry of the great Parisian hospitals. Clérambault would later shoot himself in front of a mirror, a death that pushed Lacan toward psychoanalysis. In 1932 he defended his doctoral thesis on the case of 'Aimée', a paranoid woman who had attacked a celebrated actress, and the text would be remembered as a founding French document of structural psychiatry.

The 1930s opened Lacan to the wider Parisian intelligentsia. He attended Alexandre Kojève's celebrated Hegel lectures alongside Georges Bataille, Raymond Aron and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and absorbed the surrealist orbit through André Breton and Salvador Dalí. He began a long relationship with Bataille's then-wife, the actress Sylvia Bataille, who would bear his daughter Judith in 1938. His first theoretical breakthrough, the mirror stage, was sketched at the 1936 Marienbad Congress and republished in revised form in 1949. A child between six and eighteen months, he argued, comes to identify with its own image in the mirror, founding the ego on a primordial misrecognition. The ego is thus born alienated, never coincident with the subject it claims to represent, and this asymmetry would underwrite his later topology of the imaginary, the symbolic and the real.

After the war Lacan's institutional career was turbulent. In January 1953 he was elected president of the Société psychanalytique de Paris but was forced out after five months in a factional crisis; in September he delivered the Rome Report on 'The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis', the founding manifesto of what he liked to call the return to Freud. He helped create the Société française de psychanalyse and from 1953 ran his famous Séminaire, first at Sainte-Anne Hospital and then, with Louis Althusser's support, at the École normale supérieure on the rue d'Ulm. Twice a month for more than twenty years he improvised before audiences ranging from analysts to philosophers, writers and students; the surviving transcripts now fill more than twenty volumes, only some of them authorised in their final form by Lacan or his son-in-law and literary executor Jacques-Alain Miller.

Lacan's central claim was that Freud's discovery only becomes intelligible when it is reread through structural linguistics. The unconscious, he insisted, is structured like a language; the subject of the unconscious is born when the signifier intervenes; desire is always the desire of the Other; the Cartesian cogito should be replaced by 'I think where I am not, therefore I am where I do not think'. His topology of the real, the symbolic and the imaginary refigured Freud's tripartite mind, while concepts such as the Name-of-the-Father, the objet petit a and jouissance gave a new vocabulary to clinic, criticism and cultural theory. Écrits, his only book proper, appeared in 1966 and against everyone's expectations sold more than two hundred thousand copies in France despite — partly because of — its difficulty.

In 1963, after years of warning, the International Psychoanalytical Association expelled him on the grounds that his variable-length sessions — sometimes only a few minutes long — could not be reconciled with its training standards. Lacan compared the verdict to Spinoza's excommunication. He founded the École freudienne de Paris in 1964 and ran it until he dissolved it himself in 1980, replacing it the next year with the École de la Cause freudienne. The variable-length session has never lost its critics: defenders argue that the cut interrupts the analysand's defenses, opponents that it concentrates power in the analyst's hand at the cost of patient welfare. In 1996 Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont devoted a sharp chapter of Fashionable Nonsense to Lacan's use of mathematical formulas, arguing that his appeals to topology and set theory were rhetorically powerful but technically empty.

Lacan underwent surgery for colon cancer in August 1981 and developed peritonitis and septicaemia; on 9 September of the same year he died at the age of eighty. His reported last words were 'Je suis obstiné, je disparais.' Custody of his manuscripts passed to Miller, and the long publication of the Séminaire continues into the present. His legacy is a deliberate paradox. Lacan never trained as a Freudian orthodoxy. Yet across philosophy, film theory, gender studies, Marxism and post-structuralism, from Althusser and Kristeva to Žižek and Butler, his vocabulary has become impossible to bypass — a measure both of how much he gave continental thought and of how careful any user of his ideas still has to be with them.