Book, Why psychoanalysis?[LS]

Present on several best-seller lists in France, this essay provides a masterful review of one hundred years of psychoanalysis and a projection of its future in the new millennium. Against the current of fascination with neuroscience, it attacks a society in which man is led to treat his neuroses through medical prescriptions, attacking both scientific and obscurantist and charlatanist currents. "Elisabeth Roudinesco does not mince words. In this short and accurate essay the attack is direct, in the best tradition of the combative intellectual, a disappearing figure in the era of consensus. Definitely committed to stimulating the conflict that the depressive society wants to abolish, Elisabeth Roudinesco does not let it be easy: the quarrel between scientism and psychoanalysis is one of the many facets of civilization's eternal struggle against barbarism." Paulo Roberto Pires, O Globo