Jacques Lacan

(French psychoanalyst and theorist, 1901–1981). Perhaps the most difficult of French writers, Lacan’s "return to Freud" placed psychoanalysis squarely at the centre of French thought during the second half of the twentieth century. One of the major goals of his seminars (delivered in Paris over many years and attended by all of the major figures of the French intelligentsia at one time or another), was to re-radicalise Freud’s discovery of the unconscious, the true nature of which had, according to Lacan, been misread and swept aside by the dominant, American Ego Psychology school of psychoanalysis.