Her mother was Jenny Aubry, née Weiss, a daughter of the Judeo-Protestant bourgeoise, a renowned psychoanalyst and hospital neuro-paediatrician who spent her whole life looking after suffering children: abandoned, ill and in difficulty.

She next defended her "habilitation à diriger des recherches" (H.D.R – the French accreditation needed to supervise doctoral dissertations) in 1991 with Michelle Perrot as supervisor and Alain Corbin, Dominique Lecourt, Jean-Claude Passeron, Robert Castel, and Serge Leclaire as members of the examining committee.

[citation needed] In the 1970s, Elisabeth Roudinesco's first works dealt with literary criticism, notably with Raymond Roussel, Antonin Artaud, Bertolt Brecht and Louis-Ferdinand Céline.

According to Elisabeth Roudinesco, this favorable situation dated back first to the French Revolution of 1789 which provided a scientific and legal legitimacy to reason, heed/gaze over madness, giving birth to the institution of the asylum.

[3] In his work, Ellenberger developed a conceptuality of freudianism founded on archivistics and reference to the concepts of "mental tools", "long length" and "system of thought".

The study of the system of thought of dynamic psychiatry, psychotherapies and psychological medicine no longer echoes back to a single founder, but to a plurality of singular itineraries, shattering the biographic model.

[3] From Ellenberger's thesis, Elisabeth Roudinesco retained several guiding principles, while adding methodology derived from the works of the French epistemological school: Georges Canguilhem and Michel Foucault.

From 1938, Lacan felt preoccupied by the generalized decline of the patriarchy and tried, like Freud and the English school, to promote the father figure within Western society, under the form of a symbolic function.

Roudinesco highlighted the fact that the genius of Lacan's work is the introduction of elements from German philosophy (e.g., Nietzsche, Hegel, Heidegger) within the Freudian doctrine – creating a phenomenon Freud would have never conceived himself, since he built his theory on a biological model (darwinism), by consciously refusing to consider and include any philosophical discourses, contemporary or ancient, in his thought process.

First, some psychiatric knowledge must have been previously established, encompassing but not limited to; a conceptual understanding of mental illness and related biological and experiential contributing factors rather than explaining it as divine and/or demonic possession or other traditional explanations.

Her claim is that; whenever one or both of these elements are lacking, it helps explain why the establishment of Freudianism has not been possible (ex., the area of the world influenced by Islam and/or regions where the governmental organizational structure is primarily tribal).

She noted that military dictatorships in South America (notably Brazil and Argentina) didn't attempt to utilize government authority to halt the expansion of psychoanalysis.