ABSTRACT
Jacques Lacan was born in 1901 in Paris, where he studied medicine and psychiatry, and where he began to "retravel Freud's royal road to the unconscious". Lacan finds that a child's first and usually jubilant reaction to its own reflection in a mirror, which is said to happen between six and eighteen months, is of fundamental importance. It is said to reveal a libidinal dynamism which was potentially present in Sigmund Freud's studies on narcissism and in the Ichspaltung of the imago. Freud's followers, says Lacan in 1953, have neglected the functions of language in psychoanalysis. Submitting current psychoanalytic theory and technique itself to the dialectic of analysis, he perceives the psychoanalysts' disregard for language as a defense and as a resistance which "is bound to recognize in this defense an alibi of the subject". Lacan's most famous seminar is that on Edgar Allan Poe's "The Purloined Letter".
