You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
The central Freudian subject in this book is identification and its relation to the unconscious and the ego. Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, a professor of French at the University of Washington, does not, however, consider the ego on the couch. Instead, he deconstructs Freud's theories in a selective, “privileged rereading” and does not claim to be dealing with questions of
therapy. Thus, he cannot be faulted by the readers of The Psychoanalytic Review, most of whom are therapists and not accustomed to this sort of “reading.”
The book is erudite and well translated. The author probably is more familiar with Freud's works than almost every American therapist; and he is agile enough to pick out the passages that demonstrate what he sets out to prove. His enterprise, of course, takes a French line insofar as it is yet another attempt at “dismantling the Freudian machinery.” In the introduction, Francois Roustang once again tells us that Freud set up the unconscious in place of the conscious as our new master, and that this book exemplifies this point.
Inevitably, there are many references to Jacques Lacan, to thinkers who influenced him, such as Hegel, Bataille, Sartre, and Heidegger, and to his followers such as Rene Girard, Jean Laplanche, J.-B. Pontalis, and Jacques Derrida. But, primarily, Borch-Jacobsen moves among Freud's texts, and those that inspired him —from Charcot, Bernheim, and Mesmer to Le Bon and MacDougall — as well as those of other deconstructionists who have “revised” them and added their own elaborations. He uses the “strategies” of the latter in pointing to “resemblance,” “gestures,” “differences,” and “transgressions,” their double entendres and epigrammatic formulations—such as, “the presence as presence to self; “the ego presents itself only exorbited”; “speculation is the transgressive gesture” —as “spectacular proofs” of his theses. So, as he picks out specific ideas of Freud's, doubles back to explain that a paragraph that cannot be understood must b