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 [psycho analytical] technique, 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 [Freud], 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. 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==