Described as "the most controversial psycho-analyst since Freud",[6] Lacan gave yearly seminars in Paris, from 1953 to 1981, and published papers that were later collected in the book Écrits.
Taking this new direction, and introducing controversial innovations in clinical practice, led to expulsion for Lacan and his followers from the International Psychoanalytic Association.
There were tensions in the family around this issue, and he regretted not persuading his brother to take a different path, but by 1924 his parents had moved to Boulogne and he was living in rooms in Montmartre.
Having met James Joyce, he was present at the Parisian bookshop where the first readings of passages from Ulysses in French and English took place, shortly before it was published in 1922.
[11]: 211 Lacan was involved with the Parisian surrealist movement of the 1930s, associating with André Breton, Georges Bataille, Salvador Dalí, and Pablo Picasso.
[14] In 1931, after a second year at the Sainte-Anne Hospital, Lacan was awarded his Diplôme de médecin légiste (a medical examiner's qualification) and became a licensed forensic psychiatrist.
Its exhaustive reconstruction of her family history and social relations, on which he based his analysis of her paranoid state of mind, demonstrated his dissatisfaction with traditional psychiatry and the growing influence of Freud on his ideas.
1938 was also the year of Lacan's accession to full membership (membre titulaire) of the SPP, notwithstanding considerable opposition from many of its senior members who were unimpressed by his recasting of Freudian theory in philosophical terms.
In 1945 Lacan visited England for a five-week study trip, where he met the British analysts Ernest Jones, Wilfred Bion and John Rickman.
In 1949, Lacan presented a new paper on the mirror stage, 'The Mirror-Stage, as Formative of the I, as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience', to the sixteenth IPA congress in Zurich.
[11]: 220–221 With the purchase in 1951 of a country mansion at Guitrancourt, Lacan established a base for weekend retreats for work, leisure—including extravagant social occasions—and for the accommodation of his vast library.
[9]: 294 In 1951, Lacan started to hold a private weekly seminar in Paris in which he inaugurated what he described as "a return to Freud," whose doctrines were to be re-articulated through a reading of Saussure's linguistics and Levi-Strauss's structuralist anthropology.
He defended three assertions: that psychoanalysis must have a scientific status; that Freudian ideas have radically changed the concepts of subject, of knowledge, and of desire; and that the analytic field is the only place from which it is possible to question the insufficiencies of science and philosophy.
This he did, on 21 June 1964, in the "Founding Act"[23] of what became known as the École Freudienne de Paris (EFP), taking "many representatives of the third generation with him: among them were Maud and Octave Mannoni, Serge Leclaire ... and Jean Clavreul".
"[27] In 1969, Lacan moved his public seminars to the Faculté de Droit (Panthéon), where he continued to deliver his expositions of analytic theory and practice until the dissolution of his school in 1980.
[30] The growing success of the Écrits, which was translated (in abridged form) into German and English, led to invitations to lecture in Italy, Japan and the United States.
[31] Lacan's failing health made it difficult for him to meet the demands of the year-long Seminars he had been delivering since the fifties, but his teaching continued into the first year of the eighties.
Here he attempted "to restore to the notion of the Object Relation... the capital of experience that legitimately belongs to it",[36] building upon what he termed "the hesitant, but controlled work of Melanie Klein...
Through her we know the function of the imaginary primordial enclosure formed by the imago of the mother's body",[37] as well as upon "the notion of the transitional object, introduced by D. W. Winnicott... a key-point for the explanation of the genesis of fetishism".
Dylan Evans, however, in his Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis, "... takes issue with those who, like André Green, question the linguistic aspect of the unconscious, emphasizing Lacan's distinction between das Ding and die Sache in Freud's account of thing-presentation".
Like Irigaray, French philosopher Jacques Derrida, in criticizing Lacan's concept of castration, discusses the phallus in a chiasmus with the hymen, as both one and other.
In The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, Lacan argues that the Symbolic order structures the visual field of the Imaginary, which means that it involves a linguistic dimension.
Building on Freud's The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, Lacan long argued that "every unsuccessful act is a successful, not to say 'well-turned', discourse", highlighting as well "sudden transformations of errors into truths, which seemed to be due to nothing more than perseverance".
[85] In a late seminar, he generalised more fully the psychoanalytic discovery of "truth—arising from misunderstanding", so as to maintain that "the subject is naturally erring... discourse structures alone give him his moorings and reference points, signs identify and orient him; if he neglects, forgets, or loses them, he is condemned to err anew".
[103] Julia Kristeva would concur that "Lacan, alert to the scandal of the timeless intrinsic to the analytic experience, was mistaken in wanting to ritualize it as a technique of scansion (short sessions)".
Lacan's writing is notoriously difficult, due in part to the repeated Hegelian/Kojèvean allusions, wide theoretical divergences from other psychoanalytic and philosophical theory, and an obscure prose style.
"[140] In their work Fashionable Nonsense (1997), through which their stated intention was to show that "famous intellectuals" abuse scientific terminology and concepts,[141]: x professors of Physics Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont examine Lacan's frequent references to Mathematics.
They are highly critical of his use of terms from mathematical fields, accusing him of "superficial erudition", of abusing scientific concepts that he does not understand, and of producing statements that are "not even wrong.
Considering the "cryptic writings," the "play on words" and "fractured syntax", as well as the "reverent exegesis" accorded to Lacan's work by "disciples", they point out a similarity to religiosity.
French philosopher François Roustang [fr] called it an "incoherent system of pseudo-scientific gibberish", and quoted linguist Noam Chomsky's opinion that Lacan was an "amusing and perfectly self-conscious charlatan".