A psychoanalyst and psycho-sociologist, Jean-Claude Liaudet is the author of numerous works summarising the key points of psychoanalysis for a general readership.


Over and over again we keep hearing that France is in trouble: the French are pessimistic, they are major consumers of psychotropic medications and they lack self-confidence.
How can psychoanalysis help us understand the current social malaise? Putting France on the patient’s couch, the author examines the country’s collective neurosis and tries to unravel the ideals it inherited from biblical times as well as from the Revolution of 1789 and from May 1968.
The result is a new interpretation of Alain Peyrefitte’s Le Mal français (The Trouble with France): we learn that Louis XVI’s execution may have left the French with profound guilt feelings and an infantile nostalgia for an all-powerful father figure; that the loss of the Republican ideal has plunged France into a depression; that France’s relation to conflict is motivated either by fear or by exaggeration.

• An original, demanding approach. The book will published at the height of the French presidential campaign.
• An author who is adept at popularising psychoanalytic concepts.