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.

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.

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 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.