Pierre Janet: Definition and Much More from Answers.com

Pierre Janet

1859-1947

Pierre Janet, a French physician and philosopher, was born in Paris on May 30, 1859; he died there on February 23, 1947. Janet spent his entire life in Paris, except for his years as a teacher and his travels abroad.

For fifty years (1889 to 1939) Janet was, along with Henri Bergson, the most famous French psychologist in the world, the student of two of the greatest minds in French psychopathology, Jean Martin Charcot and Théodule Ribot. Attempts were made to turn Janet into an unfortunate rival of Freud during the controversy over the discovery of hysteria.

Born into a middle-class Catholic family, he was deeply influenced by his uncle Paul Janet, a well-known spiritualist philosopher. As a philosopher and physician, Janet had the educational background of the ideal psychologist outlined by Ribot.

He entered theÉcole Normale Supérieure in 1879, received his degree in philosophy in 1882, and was appointed professor of philosophy at the Lycée du Havre in 1883. There he began collecting material for his dissertation, and in 1889 presented the oral defense of his doctoral dissertation, "L'automatisme psychologique, essai de psychologie expérimentale sur les formes inférieures de la vie mentale." It is based on experiments Janet conducted, in the department of Doctors Gibert and Powilewicz, on hypnotism, somnambulism, and suggestion with one of his most famous patients, Léonie. Janet insisted on the role of unconscious obsessions in the genesis of hysteria and the possibility of their disappearance through hypnosis and suggestion.

His work attracted the attention of Théodule Ribot, who in 1895 recommended him as his successor as professor of psychology at the Collège de France, which he did in 1902, and of Jean Martin Charcot, who in 1890 created for Janet a laboratory of psychology at the Salpêtrière Hospital. Charcot died in 1893, immediately after Janet's defense of his medical dissertation, "L'état mental des hystériques." Although hysteria and hypnosis had been almost universally criticized, Janet, with the help of Fulgence Raymond, was able to continue working, and wrote several important works, which he cosigned with Raymond. But upon Raymond's death in 1910, Jules Déjerine fired him from the laboratory at the Salpêtrière. And in 1912 Henri Piéron was chosen, in place of Janet, as head of the Laboratory of Physiological Psychology at the Sorbonne. Janet's only institutional support at this time consisted of his courses at the Collège de France, where he taught the psychology of behavior, emphasizing genetic and social factors.

At the Seventeenth Congress of Medicine in London, in 1913, he presented a paper on "Psychoanalysis." This period, the culmination of his public dispute with Sigmund Freud, ended, as many observers concluded, with his defeat and the decline of his stature. His theories on hysteria were supposedly more rational than Freud's, and were based on the idea of mental depression that was said to be the origin of a narrowing of the field of consciousness, of "subconscious" obsessions, and the dissociation of systems of images and functions that normally constituted consciousness. With respect to etiology he also insisted on the importance of a predisposition, since dissociation was acquired, and the presence of some form of emotional trauma; sexuality did not play any special role in this. In his therapy he used suggestion under hypnosis, providing a non-traumatic substitute for the obsessions associated with events that were said to be the cause of the disease.

Although Janet modified his positions later on, Freud would never forget his criticisms and remained deeply upset by the efforts of French psychologists and psychoanalysts to give Janet priority in the essential discoveries of psychoanalysis. Marie Bonaparte and Édouard Pichon (who became Janet's son-in-law) tried to reconcile the two men, but in vain.

The founder, in 1904, along with Georges Dumas, of the Journal de psychologie normale et pathologique, Janet published a number of books, including Névroses et Idées fixes (1898) and Les Médications psychologiques (1919-1921). In 1926 he published his major work, De l'angoisseà l'extase, where he described the case of Madeleine, who suffered from mystical delusions and whom he treated for twenty years, analyzing the psychology of belief and its pathology.

Janet continued teaching until 1935 and, following his retirement, continued to write articles and even to see patients until 1942 at the Sainte-Anne Psychiatric Hospital in Paris. When he died on February 23, 1947, he was working on a paper on the psychology of belief.

Bibliography

Ellenberger, Henri F. (1970). The discovery of the unconscious: The history and evolution of dynamic psychiatry. New York: Basic Books.

Janet, Pierre (1889). L'Automatisme psychologique: essai de psychologie expérimentale sur les formes inférieures de la vie mentale, dissertation. Paris: Félix Alcan; reprinted Société Pierre-Janet, 1973.

——. (1914, March-April). La psychoanalyse. Journal de psychologie normale et pathologique, 11 (1-3), 98-130.

——. (1926). De l'angoisseà l'extase.Étude sur les croyances et les sentiments. Paris: Félix Alcan.

—ANNICK OHAYON