Bøger af Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen

The eight essays collected here extend the author's re-evaluation of the philosophical underpinnings of psychoanalysis and thereby develop his arguments for increased attention to the role of affect - of the emotional tie, in our conceptions of the psychoanalytic subject. The author analyses the political and ethical implications of Freud's work in the first part, Freudian Politics.

How did psychoanalysis attain its prominent cultural position? How did it eclipse rival psychologies and psychotherapies, such that it became natural to bracket Freud with Copernicus and Darwin? Why did Freud 'triumph' to such a degree that we hardly remember his rivals? This book reconstructs the early controversies around psychoanalysis and shows that rather than demonstrating its superiority, Freud and his followers rescripted history. This legend-making was not an incidental addition to psychoanalytic theory but formed its core. Letting the primary material speak for itself, this history demonstrates the extraordinary apparatus by which this would-be science of psychoanalysis installed itself in contemporary societies. Beyond psychoanalysis, it opens up the history of the constitution of the modern psychological sciences and psychotherapies, how they furnished the ideas which we have of ourselves and how these became solidified into indisputable 'facts'.

Offers an examination of the very foundations of psychoanalytic theory and practice, by demonstrating that Breuer and Freud knowingly falsified the historical record for their "Studies in Hysteria" in 1895.