Jacques Marie Émile Lacan
Jacques Marie Emile Lacan was born on April 13, 1901, and died on September 9, 1981. He was a French psychoanalyst and a philosopher and was a very controversial figure on the French psychoanalytic scene. He was a polymathic intellectual presence across a number of fields of human inquiry, whose work has had strong influences on psychiatry, psychoanalysis, philosophy, literary and critical theory, and film studies. A selection from his writings entitled Écrits and Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis , both published in 1977, and translated by Alan Sheridan, were the books that brought him to the attention of students of literature and theory in the Anglophone world. His work is notoriously gnomic and enigmatic as well as being prone to change, as his ideas on core concepts—such as the unconscious, the other, the phallus, the mirror stage, desire, the drive, and his triadic system of understanding knowledge: the imaginary, the symbolic and the real —all underwent changes