Lacan was born in Paris, the eldest of Émilie and Alfred Lacan's three children. His father was a successful soap and oils salesman. His mother was ardently Catholic—his younger brother went to a monastery in 1929 and Lacan attended the Jesuit Collège Stanislas during the period 1907–1918. During the early 1920s, Lacan attended right-wing Action Française political meetings, of which he would later be highly critical, and met the founder, Charles Maurras. By the mid-1920s, Lacan had become dissatisfied with religion and became an atheist. He quarreled with his family over this issue.[6][7][8]
In 1920, on being rejected as too thin for military service, he entered medical school and, in 1927–1931, after completing his studies at the faculty of medicine of the University of Paris, he specialised in psychiatry at the Sainte-Anne Hospital (Centre hospitalier Sainte-Anne (fr)) in Paris under the direction of Gaëtan Gatian de Clérambault.[1] During that period, he was especially interested in the philosophies of Karl Jaspers and Martin Heidegger[9] and attended the seminars about Hegel given by Alexandre Kojève.[10]