Jacques Lacan

Jacques Marie Émile Lacan was born 13 April 1901 and trained as a psychiatrist in France. From 1952 to 1980 he delivered annual seminars in Paris that reread Freud through the lens of structural linguistics and anthropology, later collected as Écrits. His clinical innovations and theoretical departures - insisting his project was a "return to Freud" against psychology's drift toward social conformity - proved too much for the International Psychoanalytic Association, which expelled him and his followers. He founded new institutions to continue the work. His influence spread well past the couch: post-structuralism, critical theory, feminist thought, and film theory all borrowed his vocabulary. He died 9 September 1981, the most contested inheritor of the Freudian tradition.