Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen

A Book of Lives

Freud's Patients

" An astutely argued and elegantly written (and translated) book on the philosophical genealogy and logical implications of the work of Jacques Lacan." Choice

The Absolute Master

Lacan

Remembering Anna O. offers a devastating examination of the very foundations of psychoanalytic theory and practice, which was born with the publication of Breuer and Freud's Studies on Hysteria in 1895. Breuer described the case of Anna O., a young woman afflicted with a severe hysteria whom he had cured of her symptoms by having her recount under hypnosis the traumatic events that precipitated her illness. Drawing on the most recent Freud scholarship and on long-secret documents, Borch-Jacobsen demonstrates, however, that Anna O. (Bertha Pappenheim) was never cured by Breuer's "talking cure" and that both Breuer and Freud knowingly falsified the historical record. Borch-Jacobsen points out the numerous inconsistencies in Breuer's account that suggests that Anna O.'s symptoms were simulated to meet Breuer's theoretical expectations and that her famed "reminiscences" were in fact fictitious memories induced by Breuer in the course of a hypnotic treatment.

A Century of Mystification

Remembering Anna O.

Portraits of the thirty-eight known patients Sigmund Freud treated clinically—some well-known, many obscure—reveal a darker, more complex picture of the famed psychoanalyst. Everyone knows the characters described by Freud in his case histories: “Dora,” the “Rat Man,” the “Wolf Man.” But what do we know of the people, the lives behind these famous pseudonyms: Ida Bauer, Ernst Lanzer, Sergius Pankejeff? Do we know the circumstances that led them to Freud’s consulting room, or how they fared—how they really fared—following their treatments? And what of those patients about whom Freud wrote nothing, or very little: Pauline Silberstein, who threw herself from the fourth floor of her analyst’s building; Elfriede Hirschfeld, Freud’s “grand-patient” and “chief tormentor;” the fashionable architect Karl Mayreder; the psychotic millionaire Carl Liebmann; and so many others? In an absorbing sequence of portraits, Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen offers the stories of these men and women—some comic, many tragic, all of them deeply moving. In total, thirty-eight lives tell us as much about Freud’s clinical practice as his celebrated case studies, revealing a darker and more complex Freud than is usually portrayed: the doctor as his patients, their friends, and their families saw him.

Freud’s Patients

Remembering Anna O. offers a devastating examination of the very foundations of psychanalytic theory and practice, which was born with an essay on the case of Anna O., a young woman afflicted with a severe hysteria. Borch-Jacobsen maintains that the cure of Anna O. is a myth and suggests that her symptoms were simulated to meet her doctor's expectations. This book reads like a scholarly thriller and has already created a sensation in France.

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.

Psychoanalysis, Mimesis, and Affect

The Emotional Tie

An astutely argued and elegantly written (and translated) book on the philosophical genealogy and logical implications of the work of Jacques Lacan.--Choice

Sonu Shamdasani

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'.

Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen

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