Get <i>Real</i> : Jacques Lacan (1901–1981) - Psychiatry in history

France's most famous 20th-century psychiatrist, Jacques Lacan trained with Gatan de Clrambault (1872Clrambault ( -1934)).Both his teacher's 'Psychoses of passion' (erotomania) and his own 'The case of Aime, or self-punitive paranoia' are included in John Cutting and Michael Shepherd's The Clinical Roots of the Schizophrenia Concept: Translations of Seminal European Contributions to Schizophrenia (1987). 1 Critical of de Clrambault's concept of 'mechanism' and psychiatry's biological explanations, he emphasised subjectivity and unfulfilled desire and continued treating patients with psychoses at Hpital Sainte-Anne until his 60s.He psychoanalysed Pablo Picasso .Lacan identified as orthodox Freudian, but his objections to the biomedicalisation of psychoanalysis and the variable length of his treatment sessions threatened the expulsion of the Socit Parisienne de Psychanalyse from the International Psychoanalytic Association.Lacan was expelled instead and founded the cole Freudienne de Paris (EFP).Relevant, too, was his opposition to any psychoanalysis (including the then dominant Ego Psychology in the USA) that postulated an Ego that tames the Id's alien drives in the service of social adaptation.Active in surrealist circles, Lacan always retained an interest in what cannot be completely represented or captured either within reasoned language or intersubjective recognition: the Real in his terms.Lacan's theoretical contribution to psychoanalysis includes: the mirror stage of development, the unconscious as language and the redesignation of Freud's Ego, Id and Superego as the Imaginary, Real and Symbolic orders, constituting the Subject.Psychologist Henri Wallon (1879Wallon ( -1962) ) first identified a stage in development when the infant delights at the recognition of its mirror-image as a unified wholeness.Lacan argued that this serves throughout life as a powerfully seductive but brittle means of defence to survive previously overwhelming feelings of helplessness, dependency and fragmentation.