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All behavior is communication
Bateson
UNLIKE THE EXPERIENCE of psychoanalysis in the United States, Freud came very late to France, and he was thoroughly attacked by Sartre in Being and Nothingness before he had even properly "arrived." Curiously enough, however, it was during the very heyday of existentialism and existential psychoanalysis in the 1950's and early 60's, that an unknown French analyst of Sartre's generation had begun a radical rereading of the Freudian texts. His work was to have such influence by the 1970's as to entirely rescue Freud from the positivistic medical orientation of the Paris psychoanalytical society, and to reintegrate the work of Freud into what the French call les sciences de l'homme.
The man in question was Jacques Lacan, Director of the Ecole freudienne de Paris—a hermetic and obscure stylist, a mesmerizing lecturer, an uncompromising and intransigent thinker intensely preoccupied with and jealous of his own writings and prerogatives—who was outlawed from the International Psycho-Analytic Association when he and his colleagues broke away from the Paris