In 1998, Verhaeghe became known for the publication of Liefde in tijden van eenzaamheid (Love in a Time of Loneliness), a psychoanalytic reading of the postmodern man-woman relationship.
With Over normaliteit en andere afwijkingen (2000), he tried to offer an alternative to the DSM diagnostic system; the U.S. edition of this book On Being Normal and Other Disorders received the Goethe Award.
Here, the clinical category of actual pathology, where affect regulation, identity formation and (impaired) interpersonal relationships combine at the level of aetiology, is proposed to offer a more useful basis for the diagnosis and treatment of contemporary mental illness.
The collaboration with Jaak Panksepp and Mark Solms, among others, convinced him of the futility of any approach trying to understand humans solely on a psychological or a somatic level.
[8] At the start of the new millennium, he turned his attention to the relation between social change and the explosive growth of mental disorders in combination with the ever-increasing dominance of psychodiagnostic labelling (DSM).
[10] Based on the research into burnout and depression carried out by his department, his attention increasingly focused on the combined effects of changes in society and work organisation.
At the end of January 2012, during a Belgian national strike, Verhaeghe gave a sharp public lecture at the art centre Vooruit, Ghent, explaining how neoliberalism has done away with politics.
[12] Later that year, he gave the annual Paul Verbraeken lecture in Antwerp where he argued that neoliberalism is a contemporary form of social Darwinism, using the university and the hospital as case studies.
Evolutionarily, man is a social animal in which two opposing behavioural tendencies are at work: on the one hand he gravitates towards community and sharing, on the other, towards individualism and taking.
In December 2011, he and his department were criticised in De Standaard by several Ghent philosophers of science, including Maarten Boudry and Griet Vandermassen, who claimed that psychoanalysis, which Verhaeghe advocates, was pseudoscientific.
[17][18][19] Verhaeghe's colleague Stijn Vanheule defended psychoanalysis on radio programme Peeters & Pichal against Boudry's and Vandermassen's criticism.