Richard Rechtman is a psychiatrist, anthropologist and director of studies at the École des hautes études en ciences sociales (EHESS). Since 1990, he has directed a transcultural outpatient clinic for refugees in central Paris. He is also the deputy director of the Institute for Interdisciplinary Research of Social Issues (Iris) and former editor-in-chief of the journal Evolution of Psychiatry (L’Évolution psychiatrique). From 1997 to 2010, he led the specialist hospital Centre Hospitalier Spécialisé de la Verrière (MGEN) and the adolescent psychiatry department of which he is the founder. He is a member of CESPRA (Centre des Savoirs sur le Politique – Recherches Et Analyses, CNRS), founder and director of RICEVE (International Network of Researchers Stuggling with Extreme Violence) and président of Scientific Council of the Center for the Study of Radicalization and its Treatment at the University Paris 7 – Denis Diderot. He conducts field research on the political and symptomatic consequences of genocide, as well as of the new psychiatric categories such as post-traumatic stress disorder and adolescent psychopathology.
He is the author of several books such as Living in Death: Genocide and Its Perpetrators (Fordham University Press) and coauthor, with Didier Fassin, of The Empire of Trauma: An Inquiry into the Condition of Victimhood (Princeton University Press), which won the William A. Douglass Book Prize. His books are translated into Italian, Korean and Chinese.
