Jacques Lacan
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Jacques-Marie-Émile Lacan (April 13, 1901 – September 9, 1981) was a French psychoanalyst, psychiatrist, and doctor. 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 '70s, 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 conceptualised 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 is 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 USA, Brazil and Argentina.
Fourteenth International Psychoanalytic Congress
Marienbad, August 2, directed by Ernest Jones
