Jacques Lacan

• 1. Introduction

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  Jacques Marie Émile Lacan, born on the 13th of April 1901 in Paris, became the most controversial psychoanalyst since Freud. He held seminars in Paris nearly every year from 1952 until 1980, attracting philosophers, artists, and clinical practitioners to what became one of the most heated intellectual gatherings of the twentieth century. His followers revered him. His critics called him a charlatan. The institution of psychoanalysis ultimately expelled him. Yet the questions he raised about desire, language, and the self refused to stay quiet.

  What drove a soap merchant's son to rewire Freudian theory with tools borrowed from linguistics and topology? Why did the International Psychoanalytic Association eventually ban him from training analysts, and what did he build in response? And what does it mean that Lacan's most influential idea may be captured in a single, endlessly contested sentence: the unconscious is structured like a language?

• 2. A Parisian Formation

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  Lacan attended the Catholic Collège Stanislas de Paris from 1907 to 1918, where an early interest in philosophy drew him toward Spinoza and, eventually, away from the Catholic faith his mother held ardently. His younger brother entered a monastery in 1929, and the divergence between the two brothers left Lacan with a lingering regret he never fully resolved.

  In 1920, after being rejected for military service on the grounds that he was too thin, Lacan entered medical school. His entry into the Parisian avant-garde was already underway before his clinical training began. He was present at the bookshop where the first readings of passages from James Joyce's Ulysses in French and English took place, shortly before the novel was published in 1922. He met Charles Maurras, whom he admired as a literary stylist, and attended gatherings of Action Française, a movement he would later criticise sharply.

  Between 1927 and 1931, Lacan specialised in psychiatry under Henri Claude at the Sainte-Anne Hospital, the major psychiatric hospital serving central Paris, and also under Gaëtan Gatian de Clérambault at the Infirmary for the Insane of the Police Prefecture. The shape of his intellectual personality was already visible: restless across disciplines, drawn to the strange, and suspicious of institutional conventions. His debt to surrealism ran deep. Former Lacanian analyst and biographer Dylan Evans speculated that Lacan "perhaps never really abandoned his early surrealist sympathies, its neo-Romantic view of madness as 'convulsive beauty', its celebration of irrationality."

• 3. Surrealism and the Thesis

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  In the 1930s, Lacan moved in circles that included André Breton, Georges Bataille, Salvador Dalí, and Pablo Picasso. For a time he served as Picasso's personal therapist. He published in the Surrealist journal Minotaure and attended the mouvement Psyché that Maryse Choisy founded. Translator and historian David Macey wrote that "the importance of surrealism can hardly be over-stated" to the young Lacan, who "also shared the surrealists' taste for scandal and provocation, and viewed provocation as an important element in psycho-analysis itself".

  In 1931, Lacan received his Diplôme de médecin légiste, qualifying him as a forensic psychiatrist. The following year he was awarded his doctorate for the thesis "On Paranoiac Psychosis in its Relations to the Personality." The thesis focused on several patients, with one female patient he called Aimée at its centre. Its exhaustive reconstruction of her family history and social relations, used as the basis for his analysis of her paranoid state of mind, signalled a deep dissatisfaction with traditional psychiatry.

  The thesis had little immediate impact on French psychoanalysis but attracted acclaim among Lacan's surrealist circle. In their only recorded instance of direct communication, Lacan sent a copy of the thesis to Sigmund Freud, who acknowledged its receipt with a postcard. That same year, 1932, Lacan began his training analysis with Rudolph Loewenstein, a process that would continue until 1938.

  Lacan's attendance at Alexandre Kojève's lectures on Hegel between 1933 and 1939, which focused on the Phenomenology and the master-slave dialectic, proved formative. Those lectures fed directly into his earliest theoretical contribution: the mirror stage.

• 4. The Mirror Stage

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  At six months old, a baby still lacks physical co-ordination and bodily control. Yet this same infant can recognise its own reflection in a mirror. Lacan built an entire theory of identity formation from that gap.

  Lacan first presented his ideas on the "Mirror Phase" at the 1936 Congress of the International Psychoanalytical Association in Marienbad. The congress chairman, Ernest Jones, terminated the lecture before its conclusion, unwilling to extend Lacan's allotted time. Insulted, Lacan left the congress to attend the Berlin Olympic Games. No copy of the original lecture survives; Lacan chose not to submit his text for publication in the conference proceedings.

  By the early 1950s, Lacan had developed the idea significantly further. He described the mirror stage as "formative of the function of the 'I' as revealed in psychoanalytic experience." The infant sees its image as a whole and unified form. The contrast between that wholeness and its own felt fragmentation creates an aggressive tension. To resolve that tension, the child identifies with the image. Lacan called this primary identification "alienation," because the ego is constituted not from within but from outside, by a reflection.

  Lacan called the specular image "orthopaedic," because it functions like a crutch, leading the child to anticipate the overcoming of what he termed "real specific prematurity of birth." The jubilation the child feels upon recognition carries a shadow: when the child compares its own precarious sense of mastery with the omnipotence of the mother, a depressive reaction may accompany the joy. The child then turns its head toward the adult carrying it, as if to seek ratification of the image from what Lacan would come to call the big Other.

  Lacan presented a revised version of the theory in 1949, under the title "The Mirror-Stage, as Formative of the I, as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience," to the sixteenth IPA congress in Zurich.

• 5. Expulsion and the Seminar

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  In January 1953, Lacan was elected president of the Société Psychanalytique de Paris. By June of that same year, he had resigned. A formal motion had been passed against him criticising his abandonment of the standard analytic training session in favour of sessions of variable length. He and a number of colleagues then left to form the Société Française de Psychanalyse.

  The conflict with institutional psychoanalysis escalated through the early 1960s. In August 1963, the International Psychoanalytic Association set the condition that the Société Française de Psychanalyse could only be registered if Lacan was removed from its list of analysts. The SFP honoured this request in November 1963. Lacan was effectively stripped of the right to conduct training analyses.

  His response was the "Founding Act" of the École Freudienne de Paris, issued on the 21st of June 1964. He took with him, as the source notes, "many representatives of the third generation," among them Maud and Octave Mannoni, Serge Leclaire, and Jean Clavreul. With the support of Claude Lévi-Strauss and Louis Althusser, Lacan was appointed lecturer at the École Pratique des Hautes Études. His new seminar, on The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, began in January 1964 in the Dussane room at the École Normale Supérieure.

  Lacan's public seminar had been running since 1953 at the Sainte-Anne Hospital and ran for 27 years in total. Transcriptions were later published as The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. The Écrits, his collected writings compiled with an index of concepts by Jacques-Alain Miller, appeared in 1966, printed by Éditions du Seuil. The book established his reputation with a wider public and was eventually included on the list of the 100 most influential books of the twentieth century compiled and polled by the broadsheet Le Monde. A two-volume edition followed in 1969.

• 6. Language, Desire, and the Real

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  Lacan's most concentrated theoretical work concerns what language does to the human subject and to desire. He proposed in "The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason Since Freud" that "the psychoanalytic experience discovers in the unconscious the whole structure of language." The unconscious, in his account, is not a primitive layer beneath the speaking mind but a formation as complex as consciousness itself.

  The concept of desire that Lacan developed differs sharply from Freud's. Desire for Lacan is always unconscious desire, structured by its relationship to need and demand. Need is a biological requirement; demand is what must be articulated to another to satisfy that need. But in making that articulation, the subject also makes a demand for love, which can never be fully met. As Lacan put it, desire is "neither the appetite for satisfaction, nor the demand for love, but the difference that results from the subtraction of the first from the second." Desire can never be satisfied; its function is to reproduce itself. Philosopher Slavoj Zizek summarised this by writing that "desire's raison d'être is not to realize its goal, to find full satisfaction, but to reproduce itself as desire."

  The three orders Lacan placed at the centre of his model are the Imaginary, the Symbolic, and the Real. These are not zones of the psyche like Freud's id, ego, and superego; Lacan thought all three were present in every psychic function. The Imaginary is the field of images, of narcissistic identification and the ego's illusions of autonomy. The Symbolic is the order of language and law, the domain of culture that regulates desire through the Oedipus complex. The Real is the hardest to grasp, because it is by definition outside language and resistant to symbolisation absolutely. In Seminar XI Lacan defined the Real as "the impossible": impossible to imagine, impossible to integrate into the Symbolic, and impossible to attain. It is the object of anxiety, the thing faced with which "all words cease and all categories fail."

  Late in his career, Lacan added a fourth term to this matrix, the sinthome, introduced in his seminar Le sinthome in 1975-76. The seminar extended his topology through an exploration of the writings of James Joyce, and redefined the psychoanalytic symptom not as a message to be decoded but as "the way in which each subject enjoys the unconscious in so far as the unconscious determines the subject."

• 7. Controversy and Criticism

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  Lacan's variable-length sessions became his most contested clinical innovation. The classical fifty-minute analytic hour was replaced by sessions that could last from a few seconds to several hours. Between 1979 and 1980, he saw an average of ten patients an hour, a pace that critics described as reducing psychoanalysis "to zero."

  The ethics of his practice drew sustained fire. Former student Didier Anzieu, in a 1967 article titled "Against Lacan," described him as a "danger" because he kept students tied to an "unending dependence on an idol, a logic, or a language," always promising "fundamental truths" at a further point, and only to those who continued to follow him. Academic and former Lacanian analyst Dylan Evans came to dismiss Lacanianism as lacking a sound scientific basis and as harming rather than helping patients.

  Physicists Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont subjected Lacan's use of mathematics to close examination in their 1997 work Fashionable Nonsense. They accused him of "superficial erudition," of abusing scientific concepts he did not understand, and of producing statements that were "not even wrong." The "calculations" he presented in a 1960 seminar they assessed as "pure fantasies." Linguist Noam Chomsky called Lacan "a total charlatan" who was "just posturing for the television cameras in the way many Paris intellectuals do."

  Feminist thinkers mounted a separate line of criticism. Philosopher Luce Irigaray accused Lacan of perpetuating phallocentric mastery in philosophical and psychoanalytic discourse. Philosopher Cynthia Willett accused him of portraying the mother not as a loving presence in the infant's world but as a figure who abandons the child. Philosopher Judith Butler reworked Lacanian notions in the direction of gender performativity rather than accepting the framework as given.

  Lacan's second wife, Sylvia, the former wife of his friend Georges Bataille, offered a measured verdict in an interview with anthropologist James Hunt. "He was a man who worked tremendously hard. Tremendously intelligent. He was...what is called, well, a domestic tyrant... But he was worth the trouble. I have absolutely no reproaches to make against him. Just the contrary. But it was not possible to be a wife, a mother to my children, and an actress at the same time."

  Lacan dissolved the École Freudienne de Paris in January 1980 and travelled to Caracas to found the Freudian Field Institute on the 12th of July. His last texts from the spring of 1981 are brief institutional documents pertaining to the newly formed institute. He died on the 9th of September 1981. The full thirty-five-text volume of the Écrits appeared for the first time in English in Bruce Fink's translation, published by Norton and Co. in 2006.