Initially interested in Eastern philosophy, he then turned to psychoanalysis, and studied medicine and psychiatry in Paris (where he met Wladimir Granoff).
[8] 'Because of his unique position and his intellectual openness, he was able to maintain friendly relations with numerous colleagues from different schools in spite of splits and divisions'.
[12] When preparing to present his famous analysis of the dream of the Unicorn with Jean Laplanche at the Symposium of Bonneval in 1960, the two disciples found themselves in disagreement, and 'this difference of opinion severely disturbed Leclaire',[13] still very much the good pupil.
Lacan indeed referred 'to what my pupil Leclaire contributed, at the Congres de Bonneval, by way of an application of my theses....'Leclaire's work illustrates particularly well the crossing of significant interpretation towards signifying non-sense...thus enabling him to introduce into his sequence a whole chain in which his desire is animated'.
[17] By the start of the seventies, however, Lacan was increasingly turning from his old doctrines of the signifier and the Symbolic, in favour of new mathematical formulations, and 'despite many attempts, especially by Serge Leclaire, to maintain links between the majority of clinicians in the EFP'[18] and the new approach, a gulf with his old master inevitably loomed.
[19] As 'Lacan had a hard time tolerating the autonomy of his pupils', not least with 'Serge Leclaire, the most senior of the group',[20] despite the latter's continuing personal loyalty, the two men inevitably drifted apart.