Jacques Lacan and French psychiatry

Jacques Lacan died in September 1981 at the age of 81. The French press, the mass media and several members of the French government all paid him tribute. For several years his name had been linked with that of Sigmund Freud, and he was often referred to as the French Freud. Students of medicine and the social sciences studied his writings, or pretended to read them. Even some secondary school children knew Me nom du pere' (the father's name) as a 'signifier of the Phallus'. Sherry Turkle (1978; and see Psychological Medicine, 1980) has described for English-speaking readers ' the invasion of French intellectual life by psychoanalysis and the way in which French culture has remade it in their image'. In her opinion, Lacan was the mainspring of this invasion. In his review of Turkle's book James Gammill (1979), mentioning that certain social and cultural conditions are necessary for so wide a diffusion of ideas, showed how an exceptional psychoanalyst like Lacan may play a disrupting and perhaps a vitalizing role. This editorial traces the first steps of psychoanalysis in France, the special part played by Lacan in French psychiatry and culture, and his psychoanalytical development. I shall also try to describe his effect in recent years and to indicate why he influenced psychiatrists, philosophers and intellectuals. I do not wish to discuss the value of his contribution to psychoanalysis, or to explore the reasons why he was expelled from the French psychoanalytical societies and from the International Association of Psychoanalysis. It is enough to say that these decisions seemed necessary for ethical reasons, and especially because of the extreme brevity of the sessions which he conducted with his analysands.