Jean-Michel Oughourlian

Jean-Michel Oughourlian (born 20 August 1940) is an Armenian-French neuropsychiatrist and psychologist as well as a writer and philosopher recognized both in France and the United States for his collaboration with René Girard and his work on the mimetic theory of desire.

Jean-Michel Oughourlian was born on 20 August 1940 in Beirut, Lebanon, to an Armenian father who fled the 1915–1922 during WWI and a Colombian mother.

He arrived in France at the age of ten.

His university studies covered multiple disciplines:

Jean-Michel Oughourlian's teaching activities include:

His clinical career unfolded over the following stages:

His work as a writer and philosopher includes:

Very early on, Jean-Michel Oughourlian's clinical research led him to become interested in the work of Milton Erickson, Jay Haley, and Ernset Rossi, and the Phoenix Group, as well as in the work of Paul Watzlawick and the Palo Alto School.

He then became interested in the anthropology of mimetic desire developed by René Girard and used it to enrich his own work in psychiatry.

In all of these disciplines he has sought to track down the motivations of human behavior and the mechanisms of which men and women are unwittingly the plaything.

His contribution to psychological and psychiatric theory consists in questioning the Freudian primacy of the unconscious and affirming that "the unconscious is the other", that is to say, the concrete other person, whose desire serves as a model for our desires, making us into conscious apprentices or blinded marionettes.

In The Puppet of Desire, he explains the story of the Loudon possessions, which he deciphers with the help of the mimetic theory, showing that at bottom it is the mother superior of the convent, infatuated with a young prelate, who draws the other sisters along with her by transmitting her Madame Bovary-like desire to them, plunging all of them into a generalized hysteria.

Neuroses and even psychoses are interpreted as being so many strategies of the self for hiding the truth about the reality of desire, whose fundamental alterity people refuse to recognize.

"The clinical manifestation of mimetic desire is rivalry", says Oughourlian.

Insofar as imitation is, of all human weaknesses, the one that people have the most trouble admitting, it never presents itself as such.

The patient accuses his model of wanting to steal his job, wife, or identity, betraying against the grain the surreptitious alterity that moves through him.

Pulling oneself out of the rivalrous impasse implies becoming fully conscious of one's proper dependency and admitting one's debt toward the other's desire.

This is a difficult undertaking, which requires on the psychotherapist's part an acute understanding of psychology and psychopolitics and on the patient's part the gradual overcoming of his pride.

Appreciated in the United States by psychologists and psychiatrists of the ¨relational¨ school, Jean-Michel Oughourlian has participated actively since it was founded in the Colloquium on Violence and Religion (COVR), an association of researchers who are interested in René Girard's mimetic theory of founding violence and the scapegoat mechanism.

He also has ties with the Association Recherches Mimétiques (ARM), for which he has led seminars.

He participated in a work group organized by Dr. Scott Garrels of the Fuller School of Psychology (Pasadena, California) on imitation and the most recent discoveries in developmental psychology and neuroscience (mirror neurons).

The group, which included Vittorio Gallese and Andre Meltzoff, met at Stanford University and in Paris at the Ecole Normale Supérieure (ENS) Paris rue d´Ulm.

This section only lists book-length publications that Jean-Michel Oughourlian wrote or edited.

In chronological order.

Since the early 1970s he has devoted both his clinical work and his research to applying and developing Girard's theories in the fields of psychiatry, psychology, and psychopathology.

He is the author of several books (see below), in which he developed clinical points of view around mimetic theory of desire.

He is currently the President of the Association of Doctors of the American Hospital of Paris, as well as an honorary member of the Association Recherches Mimétiques, whose goal is to structure research linked to René Girard's mimetic theory and to make the theory more widely known in French-speaking countries.

Jean-Michel Oughourlian is Ambassador of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta to Armenia.

He is involved in the fight against poverty, exclusion, and sickness through the defense of the physical, psychological, and spiritual integrity of individuals.