Jacques Lacan, who has applied structuralism to psychoanalysis, began his clinical training in psychiatry in 1927 and concluded in 1932 with a doctoral thesis entitled On Paranoia in its Relationship to Personality. As his own thought began to take shape after the doctoral thesis, two themes intrigued him: the role of the image and the role of the social in personality formation. The role of the image is the focus of a paper given at the Fourteenth International Psychoanalytic Congress at Marienbad in 1936 that was entitled, “The Mirror Phase.” The second theme, the role of the social milieu, found articulation in an article on “The Family” in de Monzie's edition of the Encyclopédie française ; in this article Lacan maintains that the family is more significant as a social milieu than as a biological fabric out of which the subject is cut.

Lacan was well established in 1949, when at the Sixteenth International Psychoanalytic Congress in Zurich he delivered a revised