ABSTRACT
Jacques Lacan (1901-81) was born in Paris to a Roman Catholic family. He earned a medical degree at the Sorbonne and then trained as a psychoanalyst. His relationship with mainstream psychoanalysis in Europe was tense, and he resigned from the Société psychanalytique de Paris in 1953the same year he gave his famous lecture “The Function and the Field of Speech and Language” at the International Psychoanalytic Association in Rome (also referred to as “The Rome Discourse”). In that same year he inaugurated his weekly seminar, which continued almost until his death. Lacan’s seminar was the primary venue for sharing his work. Most of his published essays were originally given as papers in his seminar, which was attended by many influential intellectuals, including Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray. In 1963 he founded the École Freudienne de Paris.
