The Freudian Subject: By Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen. Translated by Catherine Porter from the French edition (Le Sujet freudien, Flammarion, 1982). Stanford, California: Stanford University Press. 1988. Pp. ix + 278.

This dense work of psychoanalytic exegesis by a professor of French literature takes on no less a subject than the definition of human nature itself, as approached through the work of Sigmund Freud. Following a classic philosophical quest beginning at least with Descartes, it explores the terrain mapped out by terms such as subject, self, or ego, central questions for any systematic approach to understanding human beings and certainly ones crucial to psychoanalytic theory. Borch-Jacobsen wants to challenge Freud's thesis that the human essence is rooted in individual instinctual desire and its political-social corollary that we belong to a society of subjects bound together by relations of love and aggression. In doing so, he enters into a contemporary dialogue with other, mainly French intellectuals grappling with the impact of Freud's decentring discoveries of the role of unconscious processes on human relations.

Briefly stated, Borch-Jacobsen's thesis is that imitation, 'mimesis', is the crucial process that structures the human psyche, which begins without any centre or self or ego and forms itself only by becoming another, by taking the model of another, and, henceforth, is governed by the violent desire to usurp the place of the other. If this rough abbreviation has the ring of Hegel or Sartre more than of Freud, it is because the author's thinking has been profoundly shaped by a psychoanalytic tradition in France which has retained its philosophical roots and predilections. Central to this intellectual context is a methodology of close textual analysis, a sort of 'deconstruction' of a work aiming to expose its invisible seams and underpinnings, which may be unfamiliar to many American analysts and psychiatrists. In this case, Borch-Jacobsen uses this microscope to examine several of Freud's tests, notably the essays 'On narcissism' (1914) and 'Group psychology and the analysis of the ego' (1921), works which deal directly with basic questions of subject