Why Psychoanalysis

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? Roudinesco tackles this difficult question, exploring what she sees as a "depressive society": an epidemic of distress being addressed only by an increasing reliance on prescription drugs.

Elisabeth Roudinesco teaches at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris. She is the author of twelve other books, including Jacques Lacan (Columbia 1999) and Revolution and Madness: The Lives and Legends of Theroigne de Mericourt.Rachel Bowlby is a professor of English at the University of York. She has written Carried Away: The Invention of Modern Shopping(Columbia 2001); Feminist Destinations and Further Essays on Virginia Woolf; Just Looking: Consumer Culture in Dreise, Gissing, and Zola; Still Crazy After All These Years: Woman, Writing, and Psychoanalysis; and Shopping with Freud.