John Forrester (25 August 1949 – 24 November 2015) was a British historian and philosopher of science and medicine.[1] His main interests were in the history of the human sciences, in particular psychoanalysis and psychiatry.

Much of his research was devoted to the history of psychoanalysis and the life and work of Sigmund Freud; he also studied the work of Jacques Lacan for many years, including co-translating two of Lacan's Seminars. His PhD thesis became his first published book, Language and the Origins of Psychoanalysis (1980), which argued for the considerable influence of the sciences of language, from neurology (aphasia) to philology, on the development of Freud's psychoanalysis. Freud's Women (1992), co-written with Lisa Appignanesi, explored the part that women played in Freud's work and the history of psychoanalysis, from patients to practitioners, including the extensive debates over the nature of femininity that took place in Freud's work, during his lifetime and in second wave feminism of the 1960s and 1970s.

John Forrester died on 24 November 2015 of cancer.