Making Minds and Madness: From Hysteria to Depression.
Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen.
2009,
ISBN: 978-0-521-71688-8.
This splendid volume should be
on the book-shelf of everyone interested in the study of psychiatry and related
subjects dealing with mental health.
As
the Hannah Professor of the History of Medicine at the
In
understanding the relationship between society and psychiatric illness, Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen plucks the
baton from the faltering hands of the psychoanalysts and carries it into the
21st century. Here, from a historian of psychiatry, are some strikingly
original suggestions for understanding traumatic neurosis, seduction theory,
multiple personality, and much more .
.
. This book has been put
together from several papers originally published in French plus a couple of
chapters specifically for this publication. However, the author has successfully
created a new and coherent whole with the production of this volume. It is
divided into four Parts:
Part I, Microhistories
of trauma. The largest and last chapter in this section entitled "A black
box named `Sybil'" is an excellent discussion of the hazards of diagnosing
Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD).
Part II is entitled "Fragments of a theory
of generalized artifact";
Part III is simply "The Freudian
Century"; and
Part IV, Market psychiatry.
These
four fascinating sections are preceded by a seventeen-page Introduction of careful,
questioning rigour where the author poses many of the issues examined in the
main body of the text -- i.e., just what is the subject of psychiatry? and how frequently do we take for granted medical authority
as an impersonal statement of well-founded truth? These issues are, in effect,
the whole concern of this ingenious book. Freud is shown as being a
rhetorically persuasive personality, not as a discoverer of human mental
problems.
One may disagree with some of the author's
statements; but the questions he raises are important, difficult to answer, and
worth investigation.
Robert WILCOCKS, Professor Emeritus of French,