In this revolutionary volume Jean-Michel Oughourlian shows how René Girard's hypotheses can be combined with the insights of neuroscientists to shed new light on the "mimetic brain." Offering up clinical studies and a complete reevaluation of classical psychiatry, Oughourlian explores the interaction among reason, emotions, and imitation and reveals a misunderstood driving force behind mental illness. Oughourlian's analyses shake the very foundations of psychiatry as we know it.

Jean-Michel Oughourlian is the former chief of psychiatry at the American Hospital of Paris and a former professor of clinical psychopathology at the Sorbonne. He collaborated with René Girard on Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World (1978) and has authored several books on psychiatry, neuroscience, and mimetic theory, including The Genesis of Desire (2008), Psychopolitics (2012), and The Mimetic Brain (2016). He is a founding member of the Association Recherches Mimétiques, a French organization devoted to René Girard's thought.