Biography

Jacques Lacan (1901-1981) was an influential and controversial French psychoanalyst, from a Catholic family, who were vinegar merchants. Witnessing the hideous suffering of World War I veterans prompted him to become a doctor.

Lacan's wife Sylvia Bataille was an acclaimed French actress (Renoir's Crime of Monsieur Lange and his A Day in the Country) whose first husband was the troubled surrealist novelist Georges Bataille (Ma mere, Story of the Eye - both filmed 2004). The Batailles' daughter Laurence (1930-1966) also became a psychiatrist and acted in Renoir's movie French Cancan.

Lacan himself was influenced by surrealists, including Spanish painter Salvador Dali, inspiring Lacan to devise a unique synthesis of psychiatry and Surrealism. He pushed for psychiatry to go "back to Freud's" basic principles, and his theories have been categorized as "post-structuralism." His interdisciplinary approach has been credited with his theories becoming influential outside of psychology, for example, in philosophy. His students include anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss and philosopher Michel Foucault. His critics include the U.S. linguist Noam Chomsky.

Lacan much preferred public seminars to writing.
- IMDb mini biography by: David Stevens

One of his daughters Sybille (1940-2013) is a translator who wrote a memoir on her father: "Un Père".

A warning is usually handed out by the Lacanentusiasten. Interest in Lacan's theories can expect great insights a payback. But one must be prepared to devote a lot of time. However, it is not certain that time helps, too much at Lacan is vague, blur, strange and contradictory. His linguistic insight is usually formulated as "the unconscious is structured as a language". That's exactly how Lacan expressed himself once at a lecture in Baltimore. There he claimed that the best image of the unconscious was the view from his hotel window over Baltimore in early morning light.