ABSTRACT
Jacques Lacan (1901-81) was born in Paris to a 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 1953 – the same year he gave his famous lecture “The Function and Field of Speech and Language” at the International Psychoanalytic Association in Rome (also referred to as “The Rome Discourse”). It was also that same year that he inaugurated his weekly seminar, which continued almost until his death in 1981. Lacan’s seminar was the primary venue for sharing his work. Most of his published essays were originally given as papers in this seminar, which was attended by many intellectuals, including Julia KRISTEVA and Luce IRIGARAY. In 1963, he founded the École freudienne de Paris.
