Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen

Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen (born 1951) is a professor of Comparative Literature and French at the University of Washington in Seattle, and the author of many works on the history and philosophy of psychiatry, psychoanalysis and hypnosis. Born to Danish parents, he began his studies in France and emigrated to the United States in 1986. His constructivist analysis of the co-production of psychical "facts" emphasises the accuracy of historical accounts of mental disorders.

Borch-Jacobsen is known for his positions in the controversies surrounding psychoanalysis, especially with regard to the 2005 publication of '' Le Livre noir de la psychanalyse'' ("The Black Book of Psychoanalysis") to which he was a major contributor. In a review of Borch-Jacobsen's book ''Folies à plusieurs. De l'hystérie à la dépression'' ("Many madnesses. From hysteria to depression"), Pierre-Henri Castel calls him "one of the most prominent polemicists of the ''Freud Wars''".

Biography

Borch-Jacobsen studied philosophy with Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, two philosophers close in thought to, and in dialogue with, Jacques Derrida and Jacques Lacan.

In 1981 at the University of Strasbourg he submitted his doctoral dissertation on ''The Freudian Subject'' and then began teaching in the department of Psychoanalysis at Vincennes University in Paris, where Jacques Lacan had first made his mark.

In 1986 he emigrated to the United States.

Criticism of psychoanalysis

Hypnosis

In 1983, Borch-Jacobsen participated in a meeting on the subject of hypnosis at the Hôpital Fernand-Widal where he joined such other as Léon Chertok, René Girard and François Roustang in the discussion of hypnosis. The following year, he published with Éric Michaud and Jean-Luc Nancy, ''Hypnoses''. In this book, the authors consider the whole history of therapeutic hypnosis, the psychological or sociological theory becoming suspect to dangerous regressions from intellectual, ethical and political ideas.

On 21 January 1985, he presented a conference paper entitled "L'hypnose dans la psychanalyse" ("Hypnosis in psychoanalysis") to the Society of Psychosomatic Medicine. The text of this paper was then published in collaboration with Chertok in 1987, with replies from many psychoanalysists, philosophers and sociologists, such as Georges Lapassade, Octave Mannoni and Franklin Rausky.

In this paper, Borch-Jacobsen presented evidence that psychoanalytic transference is a form of altered state of consciousness, comparable with those that had existed in the work of psychotherapies which predate psychoanalysis, from Shamanism to the hypnotism of the Nancy School, by way of animal magnetism. He averred that "" ("The phenomenon of transference is, by Freud's own admission, nothing other than the resurgence, at the heart of the sycho analyticaltechnique, of the relation (of the 'rapport') characteristic of the hypnotic technique: dependence, submission, or again... exclusive valorization of the figure of the doctor"). He emphasised that there is consequently an important risk of suggestion on the part of the psychoanalyst, even more so when the psychoanalyst himself is not conscious of these phenomena.

Borch-Jacobsen then reaffirmed that Sigmund Freud, after having started to use the suggestive hypnotic psychotherapy of Hippolyte Bernheim in 1887, replaced it with the cathartic method in 1899, no longer using hypnosis as a means of direct suggestion, but to bring out suppressed feelings of patients' traumas. After practicing using free association in 1892, Freud totally abandoned hypnosis at the end of 1896. This is explained in the following manner by Chertok: "" ("In his opposition to hypnosis, Freud was known to have founded a scientific psychotherapy, destined, as such, to become the psychotherapy ''par excellence''. The interpretation and awareness thus became the fulcrum of the cure. Affectivity certainly could not be eliminated from the new method, but it comes to be channelled into transference, and thereby, controlled and put in service of knowledge. Such was the ambition of the founder of psychoanalysis reud at the turn of the century which was still very much filled with the spirit of Positivism"). It is precisely this posture of Freud's that the consciousness is "dominating" that was put into question by Borch-Jacobsen.

Bertrand Méheust rebuked Borch-Jacobsen for accepting without further discussion a dated view of hypnotherapy, bequeathed by the positivist institutional medicine of the 19th century. Furthermore, he argues that hypnosis follows a state of absolute passivity and therefore hurts well-being, and that hypnosis is induced in someone in which all consciousness is disconnected, a being totally immersed in the inner self, indeed a puppet who thinks and lives totally by the workings of another.Méheust, p. 292 He takes sides with Puységur and Deleuze, stating that lucid, magnetic phenomena are assumed to establish a kind of synergy between the higher functions of intelligence and the immediacy of instinct.

The case of Anna O.

In 1996 he completed a treatise on the case of Bertha Pappenheim, "Anna O.", subtitled ("A 100-year-old mystification"), in which, according to Claude Meyer, he "" ("put an end to one of the founding myths of psychoanalysis"). It is also the opinion of Elizabeth Loentz, who had also written a book on Pappenheim, and Paul Roazen, who considers this work a major stage of university and historiographical work on psychoanalysis, and a fly in the ointment of the "defenders of the status quo".

Publications

* ("The Freudian Subject"), Flammarion, 1982 (revised in 1992).
* (with Éric Michaud and Jean-Luc Nancy), Galilée, 1984.
* ("Hypnosis and psychoanalysis") (with Léon Chertok), Dunod, 1987.
* , ("Lacan, the absolute master"), Stanford University Press, 1991.
* ("The Emotional Tie"), Aubier Montaigne, 1992.
* ("Memoirs of Anna O.: A 100-year old mystery"), 1996.
**''Remembering Anna O: A Century of Mystification.'' London: Routledge. 1996
* ("Many madnesses: from hysteria to depression"), Les Empêcheurs de penser en rond, 2002.
* ("Constructivism and psychoanalysis") (with Bernard Granger, debates with Georges Fischman), Le Cavalier Bleu, 2005.
* ("The Black Book of Psychoanalysis") (with Jean Cottraux, Jacques Van Rillaer, Didier Pleux) (Catherine Meyer, ed.), Les Arènes, 2005.
* ("Freud's dossier. An inquiry on the history of psychoanalysis") (co-authored with Sonu Shamdasani), Les Empêcheurs de penser en rond, 2006.
* ''Making Minds and Madness: From Hysteria to Depression'', Cambridge University Press, 2009.
* , Éditions Sciences Humaines, 2011.
* ''The Freud Files: An Inquiry into the History of Psychoanalysis'' (co-authored with Sonu Shamdasani). Cambridge University Press, 2012.
* ''Freud's Patients: A Book of Lives'', Reaktion Books, 2021. Expanded edition of , translated into English by Andrew Brown.

Awards

* 1987 – Prix de la Psyché (awarded by the )
* 1994 – The Salomon Katz Distinguished Lectureship in the Humanities, University of Washington
* 1997 – Gradiva Award for Best General Book (awarded by the National Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis).

References

External links

("Therapy users and illness producers"), by Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen

''A Zero Theory''
by Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen

{{DEFAULTSORT:Borch-Jacobsen, Mikkel
20th-century French philosophers
21st-century French philosophers
French emigrants to the United States
21st-century American philosophers
Hypnosis
Constructivism (psychological school)
1951 births
Living people
University of Washington faculty
French male writers