The French psychoanalyst, psychiatrist and teacher Jacques Marie Émile Lacan was born on April 13, 1901 and died on September 9, 1981.

Here are a few words about his adult life.

In his twenties, Lacan abandoned religion and was rejected for military service. He entered medical school and, in 1926, specialised in psychiatry at the Sainte-Anne Hospital in Paris. He entered into a lengthy, problematic analysis and was eventually regarded as unanalyzable. (This latter fact must surely be regarded as ironic, given the fact that more has been written about Lacan than about any other psychoanalyst, with the exception of Sigmund Freud.)

In 1931, Lacan became a licensed forensic psychiatrist, and for the rest of his life and career (which were more or less the same span of time) he investigated psychoanalysis, including the work of Sigmund Freud, and made a breakthrough in 1936, when he presented his first analytic report at the Congress of the International Psychoanalytical Association in Marienbad on the 'Mirror Phase' – 'a decisive turning-point in the mental development of the child,' as he would later phrase it (Lacan 1953).