Lacan, Jacques
Lacan, Jacques (1901–81)Lacan was a French psychoanalyst and doctor of medicine who reinterpreted the work of Sigmund Freud in the light of the structural linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure. He trained at the Paris Medical Faculty, in 1963 became Chargé de Conférences at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, and founded the École Freudienne de Paris. He is largely associated with the structuralist and post-structuralist movements, and during the 1960s his seminars were a major focus of intellectual life in Paris. His work, which is often obscure and replete with puns and word-plays, has had a considerable influence on feminist theory, because of his argument that Freud's hypotheses must be interpreted symbolically rather than literally; and, in particular, that Freud's controversial idea of ‘penis...
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