Mirror Stage of Identity Development

Biographical Details

Lacan was a French psychoanalyst who developed a reputation for unorthodoxy. His seminal work, Écrits, a collection of essays, has been hugely influential across many disciplines, including linguistics and film theory. Lacan, though drawing strongly from structuralist ideas in his account of human development, is seen as a central figure in poststructuralism. He became involved with, and was influenced by, contemporary cultural figures such as Salvador Dali, Pablo Picasso, and Andre Breton.

Lacan was born in Paris on April 13, 1901, the eldest child of a prosperous middle-class Catholic family, and was educated at a Jesuit school. Following his medical degree and subsequent psychiatric training, he worked in a variety of psychiatric institutions, and attributed his move into psychoanalysis to his contact with the then-influential psychiatrist, Gaëtan Gatian de Clérambault. Lacan completed his doctoral thesis (on paranoid psychosis) in 1932, became a member of La Société Psychoanalytique de Paris (SPP), and began his personal psychoanalysis, which he continued until war broke out. Clinically and professionally inactive as a matter of principle during the Nazi occupation, he rejoined the SPP during peacetime.

He developed his prominent, but complicated, reputation during the postwar years, with expulsion from the International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA) in 1962 being the most highprofile example of the controversy that he generated. Lacan consequently established his own analytic training school following his ban from the IPA, which enabled him to influence a generation of psychoanalysts with his own brand of psychoanalysis. He dramatically closed it in 1980, the year before he died, to set up instead a school for “La Cause Freudienne,” explaining to his fellow Lacanians that he now saw himself as Freudian.

Lacan published a paper in 1936—“On the Mirror Stage as Formative of the I”—that made a significant impact when it was published again in 1949. He published little in the intervening years—this near-silence indicative of a lifetime's ambivalence toward publication. In 1953, he began his annual seminar series, which continued for the rest of his life, though under the auspices of various different institutions during that time. This series was the vehicle for the rigorous and relentless development of his theoretical ideas, and its transcripts have been widely published.

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