Janet, Pierre
Janet, Pierre
Pierre Marie Felix Janet (1859–1947), French physician and psychologist, did much to bring about the close relation that exists in France between the medical and the academic study of mental disorders. He advanced clinical psychology by insisting that a knowledge of academic psychology is indispensable to an understanding of the individual.
Janet studied in both the faculty of letters and the faculty of medicine at the University of Paris. He soon became interested in phenomena related to hypnosis and clairvoyance. This interest brought him into direct contact with Charcot, whose writings he studied, along with those of Hippolyte Bernheim. Janet felt that both Charcot and Bernheim minimized the importance of psychological factors in psychoneurotic manifestations, and he began what was to be a lifelong study of the etiology of the neuroses.
While he was still studying for his doctoral degrees, Janet was invited by Charcot to become director of the psychological laboratory at the Salpêtrière, the largest Parisian mental hospital. In 1889 he received his doctorate in the faculty of letters with a thesis on the psychology of automatic activities (1889), and by 1892 he produced a dissertation for the doctorate in medicine, based on his work at the Salpêtrière.
At the same time that Janet held his post at the psychological laboratory of the Salpêtrière, he taught at the Sorbonne from 1895 to 1902 and then succeeded Théodule Ribot in the chair of psychology at the Collège de France; he continued in this chair until his retirement in 1936. With Georges Dumas, Janet founded the Journal de psychologie normale et pathologique in 1904 and edited it until 1937.
The study that served as his dissertation, The Mental State of Hystericals (1892–1894), represents Janet’s attempt to bring order and system into the classification of the various forms of hysteria and to relate the symptoms exhibited by hysterical patients to then current psychological theories. He became convinced that hysteria is only apparently physical in nature, while in reality it reflects a host of psychological conditions. He described hysteria as a form of mental disintegration, induced by cerebral exhaustion. In hysteria there is a weakening of psychological synthesis, exhibited particularly in a contraction of the field of consciousness and a complete and permanent division of the personality. Hysteria, in general, is deteriorative in nature, and terms such as “degenerative” and “stigmata” are, in Janet’s view, applicable in connection with the illness. For the rest of his life Janet’s thinking about hysteria remained basically set in the pattern of this early study. Charcot, in a preface to the book, accepted Janet’s contention that hysteria is essentially mental and approved of the attempt to relate psychology and medicine more closely.
Early in his career Janet realized that the various stages of hypnosis and the symptoms of hysteria are both products of suggestion. He understood more fully than had Charcot just how important suggestion is in producing the appearance of hysterical symptoms. The fact that hysteria and hypnosis are caused by suggestion does not mean, however, that they are not genuine and important subjects for study. Although hysteria almost disappeared as a disease entity during Janet’s lifetime, he attributed this to the fact that patients he would have called hysterics were being designated by other names.
Over the years Janet investigated not only hysteria but also other forms of neuroses, such as phobias and obsessions, which he grouped under the inclusive name of psychasthenia. He saw different patterns as pervasive in normal and abnormal mental life. Normal mental life is a flux of sensations, images, and ideas, cohering in an integrated stream of consciousness; abnormal mental life results from the dissociation of this stream, which in extreme cases splits into two or more streams. In the normal person, integration is achieved; in the neurotic, it is imperfect. Psychic energy and its diminution or depletion was his guiding concept:
Diminution of force and modification of the important relationship between tension and psychological force are becoming elements of vast importance to psychological analysis… One of the most important studies of I’analyse psychologique will be the appreciation of the degree of psychic energy of an individual and the extent of his weakness; we know nothing of the nature of this psychic energy, but we must study its manifestations and succeed in measuring it as the physicist measures an electric current without understanding the nature of it. (1930 a, p. 372)
In the 1920s behavioral psychology became predominant. Janet did much to further European behavioristic views, referring to psychology as the science of conduct. He held that every discriminable psychological event is also a discriminable response. But he felt that within a behavioral system a place must and can be found for consciousness and described it as a form of specialized conduct expressed in terms of action. Even after Janet began to write the psychology of conduct, he continued to think in terms of energy and tension. Instead of judging the quantity of energy by assumed mentalistic (psychic) and physical interactions, he judged the patient’s energy by the speed, strength, and duration of his actions. If energy is so depleted that actions charged with high tension cannot be performed, mental disorder results.
Janet’s approach to psychotherapy was always an eclectic one. In Psychological Healing (1919), he advocated a great variety of methods, among them suggestion, hypnosis, rest, confession, education, and moral guidance. When in his “L’analyse psychologique’ (1930 a) he developed a diagnostic tool for the clinical psychologist—an eclectic case history establishing an individual’s unique characteristics—he explicitly made further development of that tool dependent on necessarily unknown but expected advances in both medicine and psychology.
In the early 1900s Janet’s work was quite well known in the United States. He lectured at the Harvard Medical School in 1906 and published his lectures the following year as The Major Symptoms of Hysteria (1907). The book did much to bring Janet to the attention of American psychologists and psychiatrists. William James’ writings in psychology show his awareness of Janet’s work, and Morton Prince, who in 1927 founded the Harvard Psychological Clinic for the study of abnormal and dynamic psychology, called Janet’s work epochmaking (1914, p. 157). Through his influence on such men as Prince, Janet fostered the union of academic psychology and medical science.
Janet’s popularity in the United States waned considerably in the 1920s. Psychologists and psychiatrists were attracted by Watsonian behaviorism and Freudian psychoanalysis respectively. Freud himself disparaged Janet’s work, and his followers reacted accordingly.
Many factors contributed to the strained relations between Freud and Janet. Janet considered psychoanalysis to be only one form of treatment, namely, treatment by “mental liquidation,” or the dissociation of traumatic memories. He offended Freud by commenting that the term “unconscious” is suitable enough as a metaphor but not as designating an implied entity. Janet further alienated Freud by claiming that psychoanalysis arose directly from Charcot’s work and his own (1919). Not only did he claim priority, but he deprecated certain aspects of psychoanalysis: thus, he considered free association “somewhat simple-minded” ([1919] 1925, vol. 1, p. 603) on the grounds that the patient knows he is under observation, and he advised instead watching a patient who does not know he is being observed. In general, because Janet was an eclectic, he could not or would not understand that psychoanalysis constitutes a coherent system of analysis of the personality.
For his part, Freud considered Janet’s work to be in an area similar to his own but carried on at a nondynamic, superficial level and without proper regard for the etiological significance of sexual factors. Freud (1910) acknowledged the influence of Charcot’s work on hysteria and traumatic memories but resented Janet’s wider claims. Janet, an acute and original psychologist, lived to see medical psychology move in an alien direction, as his views were overshadowed by those of Freud.
Robert I. Watson
[Other relevant material may be found inClinical psychology; Hypnosis; Hysteria; Suggestion; and in the biographies ofCharcot; Freud; James.]
WORKS BY JANET
(1889) 1930 L’automatisme psychologique: Essai de psychologic expérimental sur les formes inférieures de I’activite humaine. 10th ed. Paris: Alcan.
(1892–1894) 1911 The Mental State of Hystericals: A Study of Mental Stigmata and Mental Accidents. With a preface by J. M. Charcot. London and New York: Putnam. ? First published in French.
(1903) 1919 Janet, Pierre; and Raymond, FulgenceLes obsessions et la psychasthenie. 2 vols. 3d ed. Paris: Alcan.
(1907) 1920 The Major Symptoms of Hysteria: Fifteen Lectures Given in the Medical School of Harvard University. 2d ed. New York: Macmillan.
(1919) 1925 Psychological Healing: A Historical and Clinical Study. 2 vols. London: Allen & Unwin; New York: Macmillan. ? First published in French in three volumes.
1923 La médecine psychologique. Paris: Flammarion.
1930 a L’analyse psychologique. Pages 369–373 in Psychologies of 1930. Worcester, Mass.: Clark Univ. Press.
1930 b Autobiography. Volume 1, pages 123–133 in Carl Murchison (editor), A History of Psychology in Autobiography. Worcester, Mass.: Clark Univ. Press.
SUPPLEMENTARY BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bailey, Percival 1956 Janet and Freud. A.M.A. Archives of Neurology and Psychiatry 76:76–89.
Freud, Sigmund (1910)1957 Five Lectures on Psychoanalysis. Volume 11, pages 1–56 in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. London: Hogarth. ? First published as Über Psychoanalyse.
Prince, Morton (1914) 1921 The Unconscious: The Fundamentals of Human Personality, Normal and Abnormal. 2d ed. New York: Macmillan.
Schwartz, Leonhard 1951 Die Neurosen und die dynamische Psychologic von Pierre Janet. Basel: Schwabe.