Jacques Lacan (1901-81), a trained physician with a focus on psychiatry, began practicing as a psychoanalyst in 1938 and became one of the leading educators and theoretical figures in French psychoanalysis, particularly through his seminar (1953-80) after the war. In 1963, Lacan was expelled from the International Psychoanalytical Association as a training analyst and founded his own École Freudienne de Paris in 1964, which he dissolved in 1980. Werner Hamacher, born in 1948, studied comparative literature, philosophy, German studies, sociology, and religious studies at the Free University of Berlin and philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. From 1984 to 1998, he was a professor of German studies and humanities at Johns Hopkins University, USA. Since 1998, he has been a professor of general and comparative literature in Frankfurt am Main and has also been teaching at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee since 2005. He has held numerous visiting professorships in cities including New York, Amsterdam, Yale, Paris, and Berlin. His work lies at the intersection of literary studies and the philosophy of language and history, in the fields of aesthetics and hermeneutics.