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 polemic thinkers with regard to the Freud Wars". 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. 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.