Jacques Lacan

French psychoanalyst and writer (1901–1981)

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Lived 1901–1981, aged 80France

France WritersWriter / Author

Wikipedia
66 languages
Cross-language footprint
Era
1901–1981
Aged 80
Known for
Thou Shalt Love thy Sy…
1996

Summary

Updated 2026-06-08

He bent Freud through structuralism, topology, and predicate logic until psychoanalysis became something new enough to get him expelled from the international association that guarded it.

Biography

About

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…

Voice

In their own words

Sourced, dated quotes from Jacques Lacan

Jacques Lacan

said1978

The important thing is not that the unconscious determines neurosis- of that one Freud can quite happily, like Pontius Pilot, wash his hands.

— The Freudian Unconscious and Ours

Jacques Lacan

said1978

Discontinuity, then, is the essential form in which the unconscious first appears to us as a phenomenon-discontinuity, in which something is manifested as a vacillation.

— The Freudian Unconscious and Ours

Jacques Lacan

said1978

Nature provides-I must use the word- signifies, and these signifies organize human relation in a creative way, providing them with structures and shaping them.

— The Freudian Unconscious and Ours

Jacques Lacan

said1978