Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen (born 1951) is a professor of Comparative Literature and French at the University of Washington in Seattle,[1] and the author of many works on the history and philosophy of psychiatry, psychoanalysis and hypnosis.
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.
[3] 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.
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.
[7] 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.