Jacques Lacan

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.