Henri Ellenberger

Henri Frédéric Ellenberger (Nalolo, Barotseland, Rhodesia, 6 November 1905 – Quebec, 1 May 1993) was a Canadian psychiatrist, medical historian, and criminologist, sometimes considered the founding historiographer of psychiatry. Ellenberger is chiefly remembered for The Discovery of the Unconscious, an encyclopedic study of the history of dynamic psychiatry published in 1970.

Henri F. Ellenberger was born in British Rhodesia to Swiss parents, and spent his childhood in the British colony of Rhodesia. He was later naturalised as a French citizen, and took his baccalaureate degree in Strasbourg, France, in 1924.

He studied medicine and psychiatry in Paris. A student of Professor Henri Baruk, he obtained his doctorate in 1934, while working at the famous Hôpital Sainte-Anne alongside such well-known contemporaries as Jacques Lacan (whose flair for self-publicity he early noted).

Subsequent to the emergence of the Vichy government, Ellenberger emigrated to Switzerland in 1941. There he went through a training analysis with Oskar Pfister between 1949 and 1952, before becoming a member of the Swiss Psychoanalytic Society (SSP).

In 1952, in a major career change, Ellenberger became the head of psychiatric services at the Menninger Clinic in the USA, and later went on to become Professor of Criminology at the Université de Montréal, in Canada. There he was to do pioneering work on victimology, exploring the psychodynamics between offender and victim.

Ellenberger is chiefly remembered for The Discovery of the Unconscious, an encyclopedic study of the history of dynamic psychiatry published in 1970. This work traced the origins of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy back to its 18th-century prehistory in the attempts to heal disease through exorcism, as practiced by the Catholic priest Johann Joseph Gassner, and from him through the researchers of hypnotism, Franz Mesmer and the Marquis de Puységur, to the 19th century neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot and the main figures of 20th century psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud, Alfred Adler and Carl Gustav Jung.

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