Why do some people still choose psychoanalysis-Freud's so-called talking cure-when numerous medications are available that treat the symptoms of psychic distress so much faster? Elisabeth Roudinesco tackles this difficult question, exploring what she sees as a "depressive society" an epidemic of distress addressed only by an increasing reliance on prescription drugs.

Far from contesting the efficacy of new medications like Prozac, Zoloft, and Viagra in alleviating the symptoms of any number of mental or nervous conditions, Roudinesco argues that the use of such drugs fails to solve...

"For what tomorrow will be, no one knows," writes Victor Hugo. This dialogue, proposed to Jacques Derrida by the historian Elisabeth Roudinesco, brings together two longtime friends who share a common history and an intellectual heritage. While their perspectives are often different, they have many common reference points: psychoanalysis, above all, but also the authors and works that have come to be known outside France as "post-structuralist." Beginning with a revealing glance back at the French intellectual scene over the past forty years, Derrida and Roudinesco go on to address a number...

"For what tomorrow will be, no one knows," writes Victor Hugo.

This dialogue, proposed to Jacques Derrida by the historian Elisabeth Roudinesco, brings together two longtime friends who share a common history and an intellectual heritage. While their perspectives are often different, they have many common reference points: psychoanalysis, above all, but also the authors and works that have come to be known outside France as "post-structuralist."

Beginning with a revealing glance back at the French intellectual scene over the past forty years, Derrida and Roudinesco go on to...

Theroigne de Mericourt (1762-1817), a courageous woman who refused the sex-roles of her era, was a firebrand and rebel who found her life-passion in the revolutionary struggle. Though she fought, sabre-in-hand, for the Revolution, her rejection and persecution by both enemies and fellow revolutionaries provoked her to madness; she was institutionalized at age 31 and died in an asylum. Theroigne de Mericourt became a famous test-case for early psychiatry during the period of the birth of the asylum. In this biography, Roudinesco adds a new dimension to our understanding of early feminism and...

The author offers the reader a life Balzacian in its sweep: the story of a young man from the provinces determined to leave his family fortune and its old-fashioned values behind; the young doctor in Paris who set out to reinvent clinical psychotherapy and ended up transforming fundamental notions of the self, sexuality and the culture that shapes it all. Roudinesco follows the development of Lacan's career from his early clinical practice and conflicts with the establishment, as he constantly pushed the boundaries of psychoanalysis from its roots in biology and neurology to a powerful...

For Elisabeth Roudinesco, a historian of psychoanalysis and one of France's leading intellectuals, Canguilhem, Sartre, Foucault, Althusser, Deleuze, and Derrida represent a "great generation" of French philosophers who accomplished remarkable work and lived incredible lives. These troubled and innovative thinkers endured World War II and the cultural and political revolution of the 1960s, and their cultural horizon was dominated by Marxism and psychoanalysis, though they were by no means strict adherents to the doctrines of Marx and Freud.

Roudinesco knew many of these intellectuals...

Where does perversion begin? Who is perverse? Ever since the word first appeared in the Middle Ages, anyone who delights in evil and in the destruction of the self or others has been described as 'perverse'. But while the experience of perversion is universal, every era has seen it and dealt with it in its own way.

For Elisabeth Roudinesco, a historian of psychoanalysis and one of France's leading intellectuals, Canguilhem, Sartre, Foucault, Althusser, Deleuze, and Derrida represent a "great generation" of French philosophers who accomplished remarkable work and lived incredible lives. These troubled and innovative thinkers endured World War II and the cultural and political revolution of the 1960s, and their cultural horizon was dominated by Marxism and psychoanalysis, though they were by no means strict adherents to the doctrines of Marx and Freud.

Roudinesco knew many of these intellectuals...

The history of perversion in the West is told here through a study of great emblematic figures from the Middle Ages (Gilles de Rais, the mystics and the flagellants), the eighteenth century (Sade), the nineteenth century (the masturbating child, the male homosexual and the hysterical woman) to modern times (Nazism in the twentieth century, and the complementary figures of the paedophile and the terrorist in the twenty-first). Our era has less and less faith in emancipation through the exercise of human freedom and does not really believe that we all have our dark side, but pretends to believe...

What does it mean to be Jewish? What is an anti-Semite? Why does the enigmatic identity of the men who founded the first monotheistic religion arouse such passions?

We need to return to the Jewish question. We need, first, to distinguish between the anti-Judaism of medieval times, which persecuted the Jews, and the anti-Judaism of the Enlightenment, which emancipated them while being critical of their religion. It is a mistake to confuse the two and see everyone from Voltaire to Hitler as anti-Semitic in the same way. Then we need to focus on the development of anti-Semitism in...