In France we too first heard the name of Jacques Lacan long before we knew what his new contributions actually were to what is still called the “anthropological sciences.” His name is now beginning to be mentioned in other countries, at the same time as his ideas and his theories are beginning to become accessible there. I do not propose to even summarize here what these new ideas consist of. What I want to do is to situate this name, Lacan.

In France, after the Second World War, when the intellectual arena was occupied by the existentialists and the phenomenologists, notably Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, the psychoanalytical profession had let the Freudian discoveries dissipate and degrade. This degradation was the result of an impoverishing “medicalization” and an intellectual slothfulness which had led to an emphasis on clinical practice alone, as if it were