Henri Frédéric Ellenberger (6 November 1905 – 1 May 1993) was a Canadian psychiatrist, medical historian, and criminologist, sometimes considered the founding historiographer of psychiatry.

[3] A student of Professor Henri Baruk, he obtained his doctorate in 1934,[4] while working at the famous Hôpital Sainte-Anne alongside such well-known contemporaries as Jacques Lacan (whose flair for self-publicity he early noted).

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.

[16] His unique career path and independent, if moderate, Freudian revisionism, made him at times an isolated figure, especially with the biological turn in psychiatry at the close of the twentieth century.

[20] Ellenberger has been criticised for modelling his picture of the origins of psychiatry in the Enlightenment clash with Demonology — in the triumph of illuminated reason over the blindness of faith.