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Chapter 2 - The Analytic Cure
- Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, University of Washington
- Translated by Katy Masuga
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- Freud's Thinking
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- 21 September 2023
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- 05 October 2023, pp 30-51
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The unconscious being unknowable, how can the psychoanalyst be certain that the memory he recovers with the help of hypnosis is real, or that his interpretations of the patient’s free associations are correct? How, in other words, can his theories be validated? The patient’s assent or dissent cannot be trusted in this regard since the theory predicts that he or she will “resist” the unveiling of the repressed, as illustrated by the “Dora” case. The scientific controversy that is the analytic cure cannot come to a conclusion since it takes the form of an analysis of resistance to analysis, more specifically, of an analysis of patients’ positive or negative transference onto the analyst. Even a confirmation by the patient of the analyst’s interpretations is not going to settle the matter since it might be yet another ruse of transference resistance. In the end, it is the analyst who decides whether the interpretation – and the theory behind it – is correct or not. Hence the crucial importance in psychoanalytic theory of Freud’s “self-analysis,” since it – and it only – guarantees that the founder initially gained unfettered access to the unconscious.
Chapter 4 - Drives
- Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, University of Washington
- Translated by Katy Masuga
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- Freud's Thinking
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- 21 September 2023
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- 05 October 2023, pp 90-123
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After the biological turn of the Fliess years, the key word in psychoanalysis is no longer “trauma” but “drive.” The ultimate cause of neurotic disorders is no longer to be found in an external accident but in internal, hereditary instincts that repeat, in a compulsive and reflex way, the history of life and the species. As a result, everything that was previously described in terms of neuro-physio-psychological conflicts (desire/defense, will/counter-will, repression/return of the repressed, etc.) is henceforth interpreted as expressing conflicts between biological drives: sexual drive (reproductive instinct)/ego drive (self-preservation instinct); object (erotic) libido/ego (narcissistic) libido; and finally, life drive/death drive, Eros/Thanatos. Freud’s metapsychology is a speculative metabiology.
Bibliography
- Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, University of Washington
- Translated by Katy Masuga
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Copyright page
- Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, University of Washington
- Translated by Katy Masuga
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- Freud's Thinking
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- 21 September 2023
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- 05 October 2023, pp iv-iv
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Contents
- Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, University of Washington
- Translated by Katy Masuga
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- Freud's Thinking
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- 05 October 2023, pp v-vi
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Chapter 5 - Culture
- Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, University of Washington
- Translated by Katy Masuga
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- Freud's Thinking
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- 21 September 2023
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- 05 October 2023, pp 124-163
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Freud very quickly complemented his psychobiology with a sociobiological theory of culture and society. As early as 1897, he rooted the psychological phenomenon of repression (shame, disgust) in what he called a “primary,” “organic” repression that corresponded in the history of the species to the adoption of the erect stature and the abandonment of the oral-anal-urethral zones as sources of sexual excitement. To this biological origin of the civilizing process, Freud added in Totem and Taboo the murder and cannibalistic incorporation of the “primal father,” an event supposed to account at the collective, phylogenetic level for the prohibition of incest, and at the individual, ontogenetic level for the “decline” of the Oedipus complex during the latency phase of the libido and the corresponding emergence of an internal “superego.” The whole development of culture is thus viewed by Freud as a constant recapitulation and commemoration of this guilt-producing event whose unconscious memory is imprinted in the “archaic heritage” of the human race and transmitted compulsively through the generations, in conformity with Lamarck’s theory of inheritance of acquired characteristics.
Introduction
- Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, University of Washington
- Translated by Katy Masuga
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- Freud's Thinking
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- 05 October 2023, pp 1-8
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What kind of discourse was Freud’s psychoanalysis? A typical late-nineteenth-century positivist, Freud claimed that it is was a scientific, empirical psychology based on the always revisable observation of clinical data and distinguished it sharply from the a priori, meta-physical “speculations” of philosophy. Except that the ultimate object of psychoanalysis, the unconscious, is by definition beyond consciousness and therefore also beyond observation. So what distinguishes Freud’s psychoanalytic interpretations and “constructions” from philosophical speculations? In the end, what distinguishes his “metapsychology that leads behind consciousness” from a metaphysics? This is the question that this book attempts to answer by following Freud’s way of thinking, step by step and as closely as possible to the texts.
Chapter 1 - The Unconscious
- Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, University of Washington
- Translated by Katy Masuga
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Freud is not the first to have admitted the existence of unconscious psychic processes. Since the discovery of the reflex function of the spinal cord, many researchers had speculated that this reflex action also extended to the higher areas of the nervous system. For these psychophysiologists, reflex action is the very foundation of psychic activity, and consciousness (the ego) emerges from a background of unconscious automatisms that it inhibits, delays, and represses. Freud inherited this notion from Charcot who postulated that hysteria and hypnosis were a regression to this “unconscious cerebration” caused by a “traumatic shock.” This was the starting point of Freud’s initial theorization of the “psychical apparatus” as well of his first attempts at a therapy of the neuroses: psychical activity is governed by unconscious “primary processes” that tend towards an immediate “discharge” but are slowed down by the “secondary processes” of the conscious ego; the psychotherapy of the neuroses aims at bringing the unconscious part of the mind under the control of the conscious by lifting the pathogenic repression that caused the “dissociation” of the traumatic memory.
Conclusion
- Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, University of Washington
- Translated by Katy Masuga
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- 05 October 2023, pp 164-166
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We asked in the introduction whether Freud was a philosopher rather than a scientist. The answer must now be “yes,” despite Freud’s many protests to the contrary. Frank Sulloway describes Freudian psychoanalysis as a cryptobiology, meaning that it is a biological theory presented in the form of psychology. It should be added that this cryptobiology is even more profoundly a cryptophilosophy, a speculative philosophy of nature built from evolutionary postulates borrowed from the biology of the time and placed on clinical material in an entirely a priori way to guarantee the internal coherence of the system Freud was building.
Chapter 3 - Sexuality
- Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, University of Washington
- Translated by Katy Masuga
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- Freud's Thinking
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- 21 September 2023
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Starting from the mid-1890s, Freud assumed that the trauma whose memory was repressed by neurotics was of a sexual nature. More specifically, he claimed to obtain from his patients’ memories of sexual abuse suffered in early childhood at the hands of an adult pervert, most of the time the father. In late 1897, he abandoned this “seduction theory,” having realized, he said, that his patients’ memories were in fact fantasies expressing an infantile sexual wish to be fondled by a parent. This reversal, which marks the beginning of Freud’s theories about infantile perverse sexuality and the Oedipus complex, was due to his adoption of his friend Wilhelm Fliess’ speculations regarding biorythms, themselves based on Ernst Haeckel’s “biogenetic law”: the individual development (ontogenesis) of an organism recapitulates the development of the species (phylogenesis). Hence Freud’s theory of the various stages (oral, anal, phallic, etc.) of libidinal development, which was not based, as he claimed in the “Little Hans” case, on an empirical investigation of children’s sexuality but on purely speculative (and since then debunked) biological assumptions.
Index
- Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, University of Washington
- Translated by Katy Masuga
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- Freud's Thinking
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- 05 October 2023, pp 175-182
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Freud's Thinking
- An Introduction
- Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen
- Translated by Katy Masuga
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- 21 September 2023
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In this brief but comprehensive introduction to Freud's theories, Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen provides a step-by-step overview of his ideas regarding the unconscious, the cure, sexuality, drives, and culture, highlighting their indebtedness to contemporary neurophysiological and biological assumptions. The picture of Freud that emerges is very different from that of the fact-finding scientist he claimed to be. Bold conceptual innovations – repression, infantile sexuality, the Oedipus complex, narcissism, the death drive – were not discoveries made by Freud, but speculative constructs placed on clinical material to satisfy the requirements of the general theory of the mind and culture that he was building. Freud's Thinking provides a final accounting of this mirage of the mind that was psychoanalysis.
3 - Case histories
- Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, University of Washington, Sonu Shamdasani, University College London
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- 24 November 2011, pp 179-234
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Freud to Fliess on the ‘Dora’ case, 25 January 1901: ‘It is the subtlest thing I have written so far.’
Freud (1985), 433Freud’s account [of the Rat Man case] remains exemplary as an exposition of a classic obsessional neurosis. It brilliantly serves to buttress Freud’s theories, notably those postulating the childhood roots of neurosis, the inner logic of the most flamboyant and most inexplicable symptoms, and the powerful, often hidden, pressures of ambivalent feelings.
Peter Gay (1988), 267The case history known as that of the ‘Wolfman’ is assuredly the best [of Freud’s case histories]. Freud was then at the very height of his powers.
Jones (1955), 274The legend of Anna O.’s hysterical childbirth is a typical example of the psychoanalytic rewriting of history. Here, as elsewhere, Freud applied to the history of psychoanalysis (and later to history itself, if we consider Totem and Taboo, Moses and Monotheism and Woodrow Wilson) the same method of interpretation that he used in the privacy of his office to ‘reconstruct’ his patients’ forgotten and repressed memories. From this point of view, there is little difference between the ‘case’ of Anna O. and the Breuer ‘case’, the Schreber ‘case’, the Fliess ‘case’, the ‘case’ of the Wolf Man and the ‘cases’ of Jung, Rank or Ferenczi. Everyone – colleague or patient, sane or raving mad, dead or alive – was subjected to the same deciphering from the same hermeneutics of unconscious desire. In this sense, we can well say that Freud’s ‘case histories’ (Krankengeschichten) are no less mythical than the fabulous ‘history of the psychoanalytic movement’ narrated in his autobiographical writings or the history of humanity described in his phylogenetic and anthropological fictions. No matter where we look, we find the same rewriting of history, the same narrativising of arbitrary interpretations, the same transformation of hypotheses into facts.
One may object that there is, nevertheless, a difference between Freud’s polemical fictions and his case histories, a difference that we emphasised several times in the previous chapter: the vicious analyses of opponents, which completely disregard the protests of those concerned, are merely interprefactions; while the case histories and clinical observations record the results of an analytic deciphering to which the patients have, if not actively participated in, at least given their consent. As today’s psychoanalysts freely admit, in the end what matters in analysis is not so much the ‘historical truth’ of the construction proposed by the analyst, but its ‘narrative truth’; that is, the fact that patients make use of it to rewrite their histories in a way that ‘makes sense’ for them. In other words, it matters little that this construction is a fiction; it only matters that the patients accept and understand this fiction as their history and their truth.
Jacques Lacan: Let’s be categorical: in psychoanalytic anamnesis, what is at stake is not reality, but truth, because the effect of full speech is to reorder past contingences by conferring on them the sense of necessities to come.
Lacan: History is not the past . . . the fact that the subject relives, comes to remember, in the intuitive sense of the word, the formative events of his existence, is not in itself so very important. What matters is what he reconstructs of it . . . What is essential is reconstruction, the term he [Freud] employs right up until the end . . . I would say – when all is said and done, it is less a matter of remembering than of rewriting history.
Jürgen Habermas: [The analyst] makes interpretive suggestions for a story that the patient cannot tell. Yet they can be verified in fact only if the patient adopts them and tells his own story with their aid.
Roy Schafer: The analyst establishes new, though often contested or resisted, questions that amount to regulated narrative possibilities. The end product of this interweaving of texts is a radically new, jointly authored work or way of working.
We could say a lot about these reformulated versions (‘structuralist’, ‘hermeneutical’, ‘narrativist’) of psychoanalysis – and especially about the fact that they continue to present themselves as being psychoanalysis, even as they seem to disregard Freud’s pretensions of revealing the objective truth of the psyche. If the final criterion for the fiction proposed by the therapist is that the patient accept (veri-fy) it, why insist on perpetrating Freudian fictions in accordance with psychoanalytic theory as opposed to any others? Why the inevitable interpretation of the patient’s biography in terms of desire, repression, resistance or transference – and not, let’s say, in terms of class struggle, astrological constellations, the evil eye, diet or psychopharmacology? And in what way is the psychoanalytic account superior to others, especially if its truth value comes not from what it recounts, but only from its assimilation by the one to whom it is recounted?
Schafer: People going through psychoanalysis – analysands – tell the analyst about themselves and others in the past and present. In making interpretations, the analyst retells these stories . . . This retelling is done along psychoanalytic lines.
The truth is that, despite appeals for collaboration with the patients (designated as ‘analysands’, to better emphasise their active participation), psychoanalytic theory always provides the framework for the stories to be recounted on the couch, and later in the case history. There is nothing inherently wrong with this (after all, the therapist has to start from somewhere), but we at least need to recognise that little has fundamentally changed since Freud’s more authoritarian and ‘suggestive’ psychoanalysis, in which the patient was indoctrinated.
Raymond de Saussure: Freud was not an excellent psychoanalytic technician . . . First of all, he had practised suggestion for too long not to have retained certain reflexes. When he was persuaded of a truth, he wasted little time in awakening it in his patient’s mind; he wanted to quickly convince him, and because of this, he talked too much. Secondly, one rapidly sensed the theoretical question with which he was preoccupied, because he often developed at length new points of view that he was in the process of clarifying in his own mind. It was beneficial for the mind, but not always to the treatment.
Paul Roazen, citing Helene Deutsch: Freud may have been a holy figure to Helene, but she had her reservations about him as a therapist; he thought to teach more than to cure.
Joan Riviere, on her analysis with Freud: He was much more interested in the work in general, than in me, as a person. He was interested in the translations [for the Collected Papers]. He was interested in the Verlag [blotted out] and he would as soon as one came in be quite prepared to show me a German letter and discuss it with me, you see, and argue, and that sort of thing. Well, from my point of view now it is completely impossible to see it as an analysis! . . . I was also frustrated and deprived because he practically devoted the whole session to business.
Freud, analysis notes for the Rat Man, 8 October 1907: He [the patient] is sure of having never thought that he could wish the death of his father. – After hearing these words pronounced with growing vigour, I believe it necessary to provide him with a piece of the theory. The theory asserts that because all anxiety and anguish corresponds to an earlier, repressed wish, we must assume exactly the contrary. It is likewise certain that the unconscious is the contrary of the conscious. – He is extremely disturbed, extremely incredulous . . . [Four pages later:] But it is now time to abandon the theory and return to the self-observation and memories. Seventh Session [Wednesday 9 October] He takes up the same subject. He can’t believe that he has ever had this wish against his father.
Whether the patient chooses to collaborate with the analyst or, on the contrary, resist his interpretations, the fact remains that everything originates from the theory informing these interpretations – no matter if it be the ‘ready-made’ theory inherited by Freud’s successors or else, as in the case of the founder himself, hypotheses and speculations tried out on patients. We thus have the right to wonder, as Albert Moll was already doing in 1909, if the case histories are actually at the core of the theory or if it isn’t rather the inverse. In the end, what do these case histories tell us? What the patient says or does? Or rather what the analyst reconstructs of what transpired, filling gaps and discontinuities with interpretive connections – that is, what the analyst interprefacts?
Frontmatter
- Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, University of Washington, Sonu Shamdasani, University College London
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2 - The interprefaction of dreams
- Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, University of Washington, Sonu Shamdasani, University College London
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The ‘history of psychoanalysis’ which Freud and his followers recounted is by no means a history as generally understood. Rather it is an edifying fable, a scientific ‘family romance’, designed to negate the humble historical origins of psychoanalysis. How else can one understand why Freud devised such a mythic account, which could so easily be factually contradicted? Moreover, it is obvious that Freud would have been aware that many of his contemporaries would not have taken seriously his pretensions of originality. This was precisely what critics such as Hoche, Aschaffenburg, Forel and others stressed.
Hoche: How is such a [psychoanalytic] movement possible? Without doubt a negative presupposition is the lack of a historical sense and philosophical training on the part of the followers able to be fanatical for the theory.
Aschaffenburg: When Freud strongly overestimates himself and the significance of his theory, and with sharp words presents the psychiatrists from whom he has much to learn, even concerning elementary knowledge, as incapable, then one must regard him as having been spoilt by the blind admiration of his disciples.
Forel: It does not occur to me to deny the great service of Freud and his particular school. Yet I must make two objections to him; first, that he ignores the works of his predecessors in a methodical manner, and second, that he presents all sorts of hypothetical things as facts . . . According to Hitschmann’s book, [Freud’s Theory of Neuroses] one would believe that Freud discovered the unconscious! We need only refer to the numerous works of modern psychology, as well as to Dessoir’s more strictly defined concept of the ‘underconscious’ [Unterbewussten] . . . to show how incorrect such a view is . . . Freud would like to revolutionise the entire domain of psychology and psychopathology. As we have seen, he ignores his predecessors and those who do not agree with him with a sovereign silence.
Vogt, International Congress of Medical Psychology and Psychotherapy, 7–8 August 1910: I object that a man like myself who has collected his own dreams since the age of sixteen and has investigated the problems under discussion here since 1894, that is, almost as long as Freud has done and longer than any of his disciples, should be refused the right to discuss these questions by any Freudian!
Morton Prince: But in the pursuit of these [psychoanalytic] researches there has been too great a disregard of large numbers of facts, of psychopathological data which have been accumulated by the patient investigations of other observers. It is much as if a bacteriologist had confined his studies to the investigation of a single bacillus and had neglected the great storehouse of knowledge acquired in the whole bacteriological field.
Victor Haberman: Now why should Kraepelin, Ziehen, Hoche, Isserlin, Aschaffenburg, etc., men trained in psychology and psychiatry, men whose studies in association-psychology and in psychopathology (to say nothing of their neurological work) are familiar to every student in these fields, some of whose studies have become ‘classical’ and the fundamentals for subsequent work – why should these painstaking investigators be ‘ignorant of’ and ‘have no feel for the subject’? Why should they be ‘incompetent and unable to judge’? Why should it be that ‘they have not mastered the theory,’ these real masters of psychology and psychopathology! That they should not be able to comprehend and apprehend what these remarkable members of the Psychoanalytic Society have mastered with ease – some of them writing ex cathedra on the subject directly they were weaned to it – these wondrous wielders of the Deep Psychology, with their vast experience (whence derived?) and their profound learning in soul-analysis (whence acquired – all from the reading of Freudian literature?).
Wohlgemuth: Almost complete ignorance is manifested everywhere [in Freud] of the literature and the results of modern psychology, of experimental method and of logic.
In addition, most of the protagonists of Freud’s accounts were still living (notably Breuer and Bertha Pappenheim), and hence there was the risk that they might publicly contradict him. How are we to understand, then, this rescripting of history?
Coda
- Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, University of Washington, Sonu Shamdasani, University College London
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The fashion this winter is psychoanalysis.
André Breton (1990 [1924]), 94Freudian psychology had flooded the field like a full rising tide and the rest of us were left submerged like clams buried in the sands at low water.
Morton Prince (1929), ixI know of no other example of a system of unjustified beliefs which has propagated itself so successfully as Freudian theory. How was it done?
Alasdair MacIntyre (1976), 35The censorship of Freud’s correspondences, the sequestering of documents and reminiscences in sealed boxes in the Freud Archives, the compilation of the official Freud biography and the preparation of the Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud was a systematic and concerted enterprise, intended to consolidate and disseminate the Freudian legend. The legend was now everywhere, massive and virtually unassailable. Texts available to researchers and the general public had been carefully filtered and reformatted to present the image of Freud and psychoanalysis that the Freudian establishment wanted to promote. Thus it is no surprise that the apotheosis of psychoanalysis took place in the 1950s, and that it was from America and Britain, the new centres of the psychoanalytic family, that the Freudian wave spread through the world.
For half a century, this artificial construction has formed the basis of our knowledge of Freud and the origins of psychoanalysis. It is striking to see how widely it was accepted, even by those who otherwise had a critical and sceptical view of psychoanalysis. Even when Freud’s works were reread and reinterpreted in heterodox ways, it was always on the basis of the sanitised and dehistoricised version propagated by Anna Freud, Ernst Kris, Ernest Jones, James Strachey and Kurt Eissler. Lacan’s famous ‘return to Freud’ was simply a return to the version of Freud that they had canonised. The same goes for all the more recent hermeneutic, structuralist, narrativist, deconstructivist, feminist and post-modern reformulations of psychoanalysis. Despite their sophistication and their refusal of Freud’s positivism, the Freud which they interpreted/deconstructed/narritivised/fictionalised was always the same legendary Freud, dressed up in the new garments of the latest intellectual fashion.
Bibliography
- Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, University of Washington, Sonu Shamdasani, University College London
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Notes
- Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, University of Washington, Sonu Shamdasani, University College London
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Index of names
- Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, University of Washington, Sonu Shamdasani, University College London
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Contents
- Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, University of Washington, Sonu Shamdasani, University College London
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