Louis Pierre Althusser was a French Marxist philosopher who studied at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, where he eventually became professor of philosophy. Althusser's life was marked by periods of intense mental illness. In 1980, he killed his wife, the sociologist Hélène Rytmann, by strangling her. He was declared unfit to stand trial due to insanity and committed to a psychiatric hospital for three years. He did little further academic work, dying in 1990.
