About the Authors
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Pierre-Henri Castel is Senior Researcher/Research Fellow at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, and is based at Paris Descartes University; he is a member and former head of the first French research group on the sociology of mental health (Cermes3). A philosopher and clinical psychologist by training, he is also a psychoanalyst in private practice. Castel is the author of eight books on the history and epistemology of psychiatry, psychoanalysis, and neuroscience. These deal with a large range of topics, including transsexualism, the cognitive turn in contemporary psychiatry, and most recently, the history of obsessive-compulsive symptoms in Western culture. He was the 2007 recipient of the Dagnan-Bouveret Award from the Académie des Sciences Morales for his book on the crisis of psychoanalysis. He can be contacted via email at pierrehenri.castel@free.fr
Alain Ehrenberg, a sociologist, is Director of Research at the CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique). He has developed research programs and research units on mental health issues. His main books are about transformations of individualism and autonomy, mainly through the area of mental health: Le Culte de la performance (Calmann-Lévy, 1991), L’Individu incertain (Calmann-Lévy 1995), La Fatigue d’être soi (Odile Jacob 1998, translated into six languages; in English: The Weariness of the Self. Diagnosing the History of Depression in the Contemporary Age, McGill University Press, 2010, with an original foreword), La Société du Malaise (translated in German and Italian).He can be contacted via email at alain.ehrenberg@parisdescartes.fr
Marcel Gauchet is among the most prominent intellectuals of contemporary France. An historian, philosopher, and sociologist, he has written extensively on religion, modern individualism, and the history of psychiatry. He is professor at the Centre de recherches politiques Raymond Aron at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris and head of the influential periodical Le Débat (Histoire, politique, société). He has been honored as Chevalier de la Légion d’honneur, 2007. His many publications include (with Gladys Swain) La pratique de l’esprit humain. L’institution asilaire et la révolution démocratique, Paris, Gallimard, 1980; The Disenchantment of the World, Princeton University Press, 1999 [original, 1985]); Madness and Democracy by Marcel Gauchet, Gladys Swain, Jerrold Seigel, and Catherine Porter; and La condition historique, Stock, 2003. He can be contacted via email at le-debat@gallimard.fr
Bruno Karsenti is a professor at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris and a member of LIER, a laboratory that brings together sociologists and philosophers studying forms of reflexivity at work in modern societies. His writings are dedicated primarily to the French sociological tradition. His most recent work, D’une philosophie à l’autre (Gallimard, 2013), describes how [End Page 371] political philosophy has been redefined since the advent of the social sciences and their development over the course of the last two centuries. In 2013 he was awarded the silver medal of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique for the ensemble of his works. He can be contacted via email at Karsenti@ehess.fr
Darian Leader is a psychoanalyst working in London and a founder member of the Centre for Freudian Analysis and Research. He is President of The College of Psychoanalysts–UK and Visiting Professor at the School of Human and Life Sciences, Roehampton University. He is the author of several books, including Introducing Lacan, Why Do Women Write More Letters Than They Post?, Freud’s Footnotes, Stealing the Mona Lisa: What Art Stops Us From Seeing, Why Do People Get Ill? (with David Corfield; Penguin, 2007), The New Black: Mourning, Melancholia and Depression (Hamish Hamilton, 2008) and What Is Madness? (2011). His most recent book, Strictly Bipolar was published by Hamish Hamilton (2013). He can be contacted via email at darian@cfar.demon.co.uk
Louis Sass is Distinguished Professor in the Department of Clinical Psychology at Rutgers University, where he also teaches in the program in comparative literature. He is the author of Madness and Modernism: Insanity in the Light of Modern Art, Literature...
