Claude Olievenstein

Claude Olievenstein (11 June 1933 -- 14 December 2008) was a pioneering French psychiatrist who specialised in the treatment of substance dependence. In 1971 he founded the in Paris as a "centre for care and support for addictive practices". Because of this, and because he published extensively, he became well known, attracting the media soubriquet "le psy des toxicos" (loosely, "shrink to the addicts").

Life Provenance and early years Claude Olievenstein was born in Berlin five months after Adolf Hitler took power. He himself rarely mentioned of his Jewish early childhood in Berlin.

Armand Claude Olievenstein's elder brother, (1931-2006) also became a psychiatrist. But he is better remembered as a prolific poet. After they moved to France. Armand married and changed his family name to one that sounded more French. Claude Olievenstein did not do this.

Part of Olievenstein's training was undertaken at the Charenton asylum near the Bois de Vincennes park, where he studied under the internationally renowned neuropsychiatrist Dr. Henri Baruk (1897-1999). That was followed by a couple of internships. In 1965, as an internee at the hospital in Villejuif, he rebelled against the system of institutionalised asylums which, he said, simply created dependency in patients and did nothing to cure them. In 1967 Olievenstein visited California and was evidently influenced by the "Summer of Love" ideas then circulating on the American west coast. The next year, when the time came to defend his doctoral thesis, his chosen subject was LSD. Opposition to Marmottan came not just from local residents. There were still many in the mainstream medical community who believed that enforced very rapid weaning off addictive drugs was the only effective treatment.

Before the scourge of HIV/AIDS was identified, Olievenstein vigorously opposed methadone treatments and the perceived dogmatism of one or two "therapy lobbies". Instead he teamed up with Joseph Engelmajer to set up in the south (near Toulouse) Le Patriarche, an association committed to "rehabilitating drug users in a communitarian environment". The approach became popular nable during the 1970s and 1980s, but as fashions in medicine moved on Le Patriarche fell from favour, identified in a 1995 government report as one of several "sects" that had emerged to support drug addicts. He also opposed the unregulated sale of syringes (although he was quick to change his position once the role of shared syringes in connection with the AIDS epidemic emerged).

In 1987, Claude Olievenstein accepted an appointment as associate professor of anthropology at the University of Lyon. Here he conducted a seminar course on the excluded and marginalised.

His 1999 book "Naissance de la Veillillesse" ("Birth of Old Age") concerns his Parkinson's diagnosis. The condition progressed relatively rapidly, obliging Claude Olievenstein to retire in June 2001. Faced with a rapid physical decline, he soon disappeared from public life. Claude Olievenstein died in Paris on Sunday 14 December 2008.

Output (selection)