Jean Delay (14 November 1907, Bayonne – 29 May 1987, Paris) was a French psychiatrist, neurologist, writer, and a member of the Académie française (Chair 17).

His assistant Pierre Deniker conducted a test of chlorpromazine on the male mental ward where Delay worked, and the two published their findings (quickly, with what has been called academic gamesmanship) in 1952.

After studying in hospitals for twenty years, especially the teaching of Pierre Janet and Georges Dumas, he turned to psychiatry.

[2] He and the Soviet delegation examined Rudolf Hess during the Nuremberg trials, and found hysterical amnesia but not insanity in the strict sense.

[2] In 1957, he developed with his assistant Pierre Deniker a classification of pharmacological and recreational drugs that was validated by the World Congress of Psychiatry in 1961.

[6] It was, however, Deniker who shared the prestigious Lasker-DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award with Henri Laborit (who first recognized the drug's applications in psychiatry) and Heinz Lehmann in 1957.

[6][2] In May 1968, a group of about five hundred revolutionary student followers of Leon Trotsky professing antipsychiatry attacked his offices.

[2] Delay was elected to the Académie française in 1959 and wrote remarkable biographical studies on the Youth of André Gide (1956–1957), and his maternal ancestors in the four volumes of Preliminary Memory (1979–1986).