Élisabeth Roudinesco Book order
Élisabeth Roudinesco uniquely combines the precision of a historian with the insight of a practitioner to vividly portray the doctrines, figures, and personalities that have embodied a revolution of the soul in France. She singularly contextualizes the theories, movements, and debates that have continuously animated the French psychoanalytic landscape since 1885. Her work traces this trajectory from the arrival of Freud in Paris to attend Charcot's lectures at the Salpêtrière, through the extraordinary Lacanian adventure, and up to the recent questioning of psychoanalytic therapies.






- 2022
- 2016
Freud
- 580 pages
- 21 hours of reading
Élisabeth Roudinesco’s bold reinterpretation of Sigmund Freud is a biography for the twenty-first century—a sympathetic yet impartial appraisal of a genius admired but misunderstood in his time and ours. Alert to tensions in his character and thought, she views Freud less as a scientific thinker than as an interpreter of civilization and culture.
- 2016
Why Horses Do That
- 96 pages
- 4 hours of reading
Why do horses spook at things? Why do horses kick it approached from the rear? Why do horses sleep standing up? Why do horses breathe into each other's nostrils? These and 36 other curious equine behaviours are informatively and light-heartedly answered in the handsomely illustrated Why Horses Do That.
- 2014
An extraordinary book about the most flamboyant French neo-Freudian of the twentieth century. The Times
- 2010
For Elisabeth Roudinesco, a historian of psychoanalysis and one of France's leading intellectuals, Canguilhem, Sartre, Foucault, Althusser, Deleuze, and Derrida belong to a "great generation" of French philosophers. Innovative and troubled, these thinkers accomplished remarkable work and lived incredible lives, and though their cultural horizon was dominated by Marxism and psychoanalysis, they were by no means strict adherents to Marxist and Freudian doctrines. Having known many of these intellectuals personally, Roudinesco merges an account of their thought and experiences with her own reminiscences, launching a passionate defense of their work against late-twentieth-century detractors. Intense, clever, and persuasive, Philosophy in Turbulent Times captures the dynamism of French thought while also reclaiming the value of Freudian theory and the philosophy of radical commitment.
- 1997
Jacques Lacan. An Outline of a Life and a History of a System of Thought
- 596 pages
- 21 hours of reading
Recounts the conflicts surrounding Lacan's break with the institutional framework of Freudian orthodoxy, the popularity of Lacanianism in the 1960s and 1970s, and its encounters with the women's movement
- 1990
Jacques Lacan and Co.
A History of Psychoanalysis in France 1925-1985
