1901 (13 April) – Jacques-Marie Émile Lacan is born in Paris (France) (95 boulevard Beaumarchais), the first child of a prosperous, bourgeois parents Alfred Lacan (1873–1960) and Emilie Baudry (1876–1948) in a family of solid Catholic tradition.
1902 (25 December) – Lacan’s brother Raymond is born (who dies two years later).
1903 (25 December) – Lacan’s sister Madeleine(-Marie) is born.
1904 – Raymond Lacan dies.
1906 (16 November)- Birth of Marie-Louise Blondin, Lacan’s first wife.
1907 – Lacan enters the Collège Stanislas, where he completes both his primary and his secondary education (1907-1919). Lacan enters the very select Collège Stanislas, a Marist college catering to the Parisian bourgeoisie, a year earlier than Charles de Gaulle, who is a student there in 1908–9. At Collège Stanislas, Lacan receives a solid primary and secondary education with a strong religious and traditionalist emphasis. He completes his studies in 1919.
1908 (1 November) – Birth of Sylvia Maklès, Lacan’s second wife.
1908 (25 December) – Birth of Marc-François, Lacan’s brother.
1908 (25 December) – Birth of Marc-Marie, Lacan’s brother.
1910 – Freud founds the International Psycho-Analytical Association (IPA).
1915 – During the war, Alfred Lacan is drafted as a sergeant, and parts of the Collège Stanislas are converted into a hospital for wounded soldiers. Lacan starts reading Spinoza.
1917-8 – Lacan is taught philosophy by Jean Baruzi, a remarkable Catholic thinker who wrote a dissertation on Saint John of the Cross.
1918 – Lacan loses his virginity and starts frequenting intellectual bookshops like Adrienne Monnier’s Maison des amis des livres and Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare and Company at rue de l’Odéon. New interests in Dadaism and the avant-garde.
1919 – Lacan finishes his secondary education at the Collège Stanislas. In Autumn Lacan decides to embark on a medical career and enters the Paris Medical Faculty. In the same year, Lacan enters the Paris medical faculty and studies medicine.
1920 – Lacan meets André Breton (1896-1966) and becomes interested in the surrealist movement.
1921 – Lacan is discharged from military service because of thinness. In the following years he studies medicine in Paris. In December Lacan attends the first public reading of Ulysses by James Joyce (1882-1941) at Shakespeare and Co in Paris. In 7 December Lacan hears the lecture on Joyce’s Ulysses by Valéry Larbaud with readings from the text, an event organized by La maison des amis des livres, and at which James Joyce is present.
1925 – January 20 Madeleine, Lacan’s sister, marries Jacques Houlon. Soon after, they move to Indochina.
1926 – Lacan’s first collaborative publication appears in the Revue Neurologique. The Société Psychanalytique de Paris (SPP) is founded, the first association of French psychoanalysts. In the same year, Lacan conducts his first case-presentation, at the Société Neurologique in Paris. He publishes his first paper on the Parinaud syndrome, co-authored with Th. Alajouanine and P. Delafontaine, in the Revue neurologique, based on the case presentation of 4 November.
1927 – Lacan begins his clinical training and then works in several psychiatric hospitals in Paris.
{… to be continued}
