Who was Lacan?

Jacques Lacan was a French psychoanalyst. He originally trained as a psychiatrist, and in the 1930s and 40s, worked with psychotic patients. In the 1950s, he began to develop his own version of psychoanalysis, based on the ideas of structuralist linguistics and anthropology. You might think of Lacan as Freud + Saussure- a Swiss linguist whose ideas about language structure influenced the development of the linguistic theory known as structuralism. However, his main influence is Freud.