Laurence Bataille was the only child of the writer Georges Bataille and the Romanian Jewish actress Sylvia Bataille. Her mother separated from Bataille in 1933 and lived starting in 1939 with the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, whom she married in 1953. Laurence grew up close to her stepfather with her half-sister Judith. At the age of sixteen, she became the mistress of the painter Balthus, who made several portraits of her. Laurence Bataille first entered an actress career. After a tour with her theatre company in Algeria in 1954, she was a temporary member of the Communist Party and involved in promoting Algeria's independence. In 1960 she was imprisoned for six weeks for aiding the National Liberation Front, FLN. In 1961 she married Andrè Basch (*1933), a physician and her comrade in the FLN. They had one daughter, Sandra, and divorced in 1971. Familiar with the ideas of Lacan since her youth, Laurence Bataille studied medicine and entered into training analysis wit...