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Pierre Marie Félix Janet (/ʒɑːˈneɪ/; French: [ʒanɛ]; 30 May 1859 – 24 February 1947) was a pioneering French psychologist, physician, philosopher, and psychotherapist in the field of dissociation and traumatic memory.
Pierre Janet | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | Pierre Marie Félix Janet 30 May 1859 Paris, France |
| Died | 24 February 1947 (aged 87) Paris, France |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Psychology, philosophy, psychiatry |
He is ranked alongside William James and Wilhelm Wundt as one of the founding fathers of psychology. He was the first to introduce the link between past experiences and present-day disturbances and was noted for his studies involving induced somnambulism.
Biography
Janet studied under Jean-Martin Charcot at the Psychological Laboratory in the Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris. He first published the results of his research in his philosophy thesis in 1889 and in his medical thesis, L'état mental des hystériques, in 1892. He earned a medical doctorate the following year after completing a study on the mental state of hysterics.
In 1898, Janet was appointed lecturer in psychology at the Sorbonne. In 1901, he founded the French Psychological Society and a year later he attained the chair of experimental and comparative psychology at the Collège de France, a position he held until 1936. He was a member of the Institut de France from 1913, and was a central figure in French psychology in the first half of the 20th century. He was elected an international honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1932, a member of the United States National Academy of Sciences in 1938, and an international member of the American Philosophical Society in 1940.
Theories
Janet was one of the first people to allege a connection between events in a subject's past life and their present-day trauma, and coined the words "dissociation" and "subconscious". His study of the "magnetic passion" or "rapport" between the patient and the hypnotist anticipated later accounts of the transference phenomenon.
The 20th century saw Janet developing a grand model of the mind in terms of levels of energy, efficiency and social competence, which he set out in publications including Obsessions and Psychasthenia (1903) and From Anguish to Ecstasy (1926), among others. In its concern for the construction of the personality in social terms, this model has been compared to the social behaviorism of George Herbert Mead something which explains Lacan's early praise of "Janet, who demonstrated so admirably the signification of feelings of persecution as phenomenological moments in social behaviour".
Developmental hierarchy
Janet established a developmental model of the mind in terms of a hierarchy of nine "tendencies" of increasingly complex organisational levels.
He detailed four "lower tendencies", rising from the "reflexive" to the "elementary intellectual"; two "middle tendencies", involving language and the social world; and three "higher tendencies", the "rational-ergotic" world of work, and the "experimental and progressive tendencies".
According to Janet, neurosis could be seen as a failure to integrate, or a regression to earlier tendencies, and he defined subconsciousness as "an act which has kept an inferior form amidst acts of a higher level". Janet also introduced the concept of idee fixe during his research and dialogues with patients. Here, the subconscious, is considered the root of all hysterical manifestations. It constitutes the nucleus of the second state of personality, which he called as etat second.
Influence on depth psychology
William James
In his 1890 essay The Hidden Self,William James wrote of P. Janet's observations of "hysterical somnambulist" patients at Havre Hospital, detailed in Janet's 1889 doctorate of letters thesis, De l'Automatisme Psychologique. James made note of various aspects of automatism and the apparent multiple personalities ("two selves") of patients variously exhibiting "trances, subconscious states" or alcoholic delirium tremens. James was apparently fascinated by these manifestations and said, "How far the splitting of the mind into separate conciousnesses may obtain in each one of us is a problem. P. Janet holds that it is only possible where there is an abnormal weakness, and consequently a defect of unifying or coordinating power."[citation needed]
Freud
Controversy over whose ideas came first, Janet's or Sigmund Freud's, emerged at the 1913 Congress of Medicine in London. Prior to that date, Freud had freely acknowledged his debt to Janet, particularly in his work with Josef Breuer, writing for example of "the theory of hysterical phenomena first put forward by P. Janet and elaborated by Breuer and myself". He stated further that "we followed his example when we took the splitting of the mind and dissociation of the personality as the centre of our position", but he was also careful to point out where "the difference lies between our view and Janet's".
Writing in 1911 of the neurotic's withdrawal from reality, Freud stated: "Nor could a fact like this escape the observation of Pierre Janet; he spoke of a loss of 'the function of reality'", and as late as 1930, Freud drew on Janet's expression "psychological poverty" in his work on civilisation.
However, in his report on psychoanalysis in 1913, Janet argued that many of the novel terms of psychoanalysis were only old concepts renamed, even down to the way in which his own "psychological analysis" preceded Freud's "psychoanalysis". This provoked angry attacks from Freud's followers, and thereafter Freud's own attitude towards Janet cooled. In his lectures of 1915-16, Freud said that "for a long time I was prepared to give Janet very great credit for throwing light on neurotic symptoms, because he regarded them as expressions of idées inconscientes which dominated the patients". However, after what Freud saw as his backpedalling in 1913, he said, "I think he has unnecessarily forfeited much credit".
The charge of plagiarism stung Freud especially. In his autobiographical sketch of 1925, he denied firmly that he had plagiarized Janet, and as late as 1937, he refused to meet Janet on the grounds that "when the libel was spread by French writers that I had listened to his lectures and stolen his ideas he could with a word have put an end to such talk" but did not.
A balanced judgement might be that Janet's ideas, as published, did indeed form part of Freud's starting point, but that Freud subsequently developed them substantively in his own fashion.
Jung
Carl Jung studied with Janet in Paris in 1902 and was much influenced by him, for example equating what he called a complex with Janet's idée fixe subconsciente.
Jung's view of the mind as "consisting of an indefinite, because unknown, number of complexes or fragmentary personalities" built upon what Janet in Psychological Automatism called "simultaneous psychological existences".
Jung wrote of the debt owed to "Janet for a deeper and more exact knowledge of hysterical symptoms", and talked of "the achievements of Janet, Flournoy, Freud and others" in exploring the unconscious.
Adler
Alfred Adler openly derived his inferiority complex concept from Janet's Sentiment d'incomplétude, and the two men cited each other's work on the issue in their writings.
Publications
In 1923, Janet wrote a definitive text on suggestion, La médecine psychologique, and in 1928-32 published several definitive papers on memory. His two-volume Obsessions et la psychastenie also proposed more than 60 different kinds of obsessions.
While Janet did not publish much in English, the 15 lectures that he gave at Harvard Medical School between 15 October and the end of November 1906 were published in 1907 as The Major Symptoms of Hysteria. He received an honorary doctorate from Harvard University in 1936.
Of his great synthesis of human psychology, Henri Ellenberger wrote that "this requires about twenty books and several dozen of articles".
See also
- Alfred Binet
- Henri Bergson
- Henri Ey
- Henri Piéron
- Jean Piaget
- Josiah Royce
- Loevinger's stages of ego development
References
- Graham F. Reed, 'Janet, Pierre', in Richard Gregory ed., The Oxford Companion to the Mind (1987) p. 397
- Blunden, Andy (2012). Concepts: A Critical Approach. Leiden: BRILL. p. 211. ISBN 978-90-04-22847-4.
- Foschi, Renato; Innamorati, Marco (2022). A Critical History of Psychotherapy, Volume 1: From Ancient Origins to the Mid 20th Century. New York, NY: Taylor & Francis. ISBN 978-1-000-76750-6.
- Rich, Grant J.; Gielen, Uwe (2015). Pathfinders in International Psychology. Charlotte, NC: IAP. p. 55. ISBN 978-1-68123-144-0.
- Zuylen, Marina Van (2018). Monomania: The Flight from Everyday Life in Literature and Art. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. pp. 21, 22. ISBN 978-1-5017-1745-1.
- E. Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan (2005) p.16–21.
- "Pierre Marie Felix Janet". American Academy of Arts & Sciences. 9 February 2023. Retrieved 2023-05-01.
- "Pierre Janet". www.nasonline.org. Retrieved 2023-05-01.
- "APS Member History". search.amphilsoc.org. Retrieved 2023-05-01.
- O. L. Zangwill, 'Hypnotism, history of', in Gregory ed., p. 332
- Henri F. Ellenberger, The Discovery of the Unconscious (1970) p. 147 and p. 406.
- Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time (1988) p. 50.
- Ellenberger, p. 386
- Ellenberger, p. 405–406.
- Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection (1997) p. 17.
- Reed, p. 398.
- Ellenberger, p. 387–394.
- Red, p. 398
- Quoted in Ellenberger, p. 387.
- Evans, Martha (2019). Fits and Starts: A Genealogy of Hysteria in Modern France. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press. p. 58. ISBN 978-0-8014-2643-8.
- James, William (1890). "The Hidden Self". Scribner's Magazine Vol. 7 Issue 3: 361–373. Retrieved March 30, 2014.
{{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires|journal=(help) - Janet, Pierre (1899). De l'Automatisme Psychologique [Of Psychological Automatism] (in French). Retrieved March 31, 2014.
- Ellenberger, p. 817
- Sigmund Freud, On Metapsychology (PFL 11) p. 52.
- Sigmund Freud, Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (1995) p. 25–33.
- Freud, Metapsychology, p. 35.
- Sigmund Freud, Civilization, Society and Religion (PFL 12) p. 306–307.
- Sigmund Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (PFL 1) p. 296.
- Freud, Sigmund An Autobiographical Study WW Norton and Company 1989 page 11
- Quoted in Ernest Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud (1964) p. 633
- Ellenberger, p.539–540.
- Gay, p. 198
- Ellenberger, p. 149.
- Quoted in Neville Symington, Narcissism: A New Theory (1993) p. 20
- Ellenberger, p. 406.
- C. Jung, The Practice of Psychotherapy (1993) p. 112 and p. 139.
- Reed, p. 398
- O. Brachfeld, Inferiority Feeling in the Individual and the Group (2000) p. 53
- Ellenberger, p. 387.
Further reading
- Brooks III, J. I. (1998). The eclectic legacy. Academic philosophy and the human sciences in nineteenth - century France. Newark: University of Delaware Press.
- Carroy, J. & Plas, R. (2000) . How Pierre Janet used pathological psychology to save the philosophical self. Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 36, 231-240.
- Foschi, R. (2003) 'La Psicologia Sperimentale e Patologica di Pierre Janet e la Nozione di Personalità (1885–1900)', Medicina & Storia, 5, 45-68.
- Johnson, George M. Dynamic Psychology in Modernist British Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, U.K., 2006.
- LeBlanc, A. (2001). The Origins of the Concept of Dissociation: Paul Janet, his Nephew Pierre, and the Problem of Post-hypnotic Suggestion, History of Science, 39, 57-69.
- LeBlanc, A. (2004). Thirteen Days: Joseph Delboeuf versus Pierre Janet on the Nature of Hypnotic Suggestion, Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 40, 123-147.
- Lombardo G.P, Foschi R. (2003). The Concept of Personality between 19th Century France and 20th Century American Psychology. History of Psychology, vol. 6; 133-142, ISSN 1093-4510, doi:10.1037/1093-4510.6.2.123
- Serina F. (2020) « Janet-Schwartz-Ellenberger: the history of a triangular relationship through their unpublished correspondence » History of Psychiatry, 31, 1, p. 3-20. doi:10.1177/0957154X19877601
External links
Pierre Janet
About Pierre Janet
- Short biography
- Bibliographic site
- Reading guide
- "Autobiography" of his early years
- Pierre Janet & the 'Reality Function'
- JANETIAN STUDIES electronic journal of the Institut Pierre Janet
Works of Pierre Janet
- Psychological Automatism: Essay of Experimental Psychology on the Lower Forms of Human Activity Doctorate of Science thesis of Pierre Janet.
- La Médecine Psychologique Important book by Pierre Janet. It clarifies what he thought about Suggestion. (PDF download) (in French)
- Books by Pierre Janet on line (in French)
- Works by Pierre Janet at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)
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You can help expand this article with text translated from the corresponding article in French June 2012 Click show for important translation instructions View a machine translated version of the French article Machine translation like DeepL or Google Translate is a useful starting point for translations but translators must revise errors as necessary and confirm that the translation is accurate rather than simply copy pasting machine translated text into the English Wikipedia Do not translate text that appears unreliable or low quality If possible verify the text with references provided in the foreign language article You must provide copyright attribution in the edit summary accompanying your translation by providing an interlanguage link to the source of your translation A model attribution edit summary is Content in this edit is translated from the existing French Wikipedia article at fr Pierre Janet see its history for attribution You may also add the template Translated fr Pierre Janet to the talk page For more guidance see Wikipedia Translation Pierre Marie Felix Janet ʒ ɑː ˈ n eɪ French ʒanɛ 30 May 1859 24 February 1947 was a pioneering French psychologist physician philosopher and psychotherapist in the field of dissociation and traumatic memory Pierre JanetBornPierre Marie Felix Janet 1859 05 30 30 May 1859 Paris FranceDied24 February 1947 1947 02 24 aged 87 Paris FranceScientific careerFieldsPsychology philosophy psychiatry He is ranked alongside William James and Wilhelm Wundt as one of the founding fathers of psychology He was the first to introduce the link between past experiences and present day disturbances and was noted for his studies involving induced somnambulism BiographyJanet studied under Jean Martin Charcot at the Psychological Laboratory in the Pitie Salpetriere Hospital in Paris He first published the results of his research in his philosophy thesis in 1889 and in his medical thesis L etat mental des hysteriques in 1892 He earned a medical doctorate the following year after completing a study on the mental state of hysterics In 1898 Janet was appointed lecturer in psychology at the Sorbonne In 1901 he founded the French Psychological Society and a year later he attained the chair of experimental and comparative psychology at the College de France a position he held until 1936 He was a member of the Institut de France from 1913 and was a central figure in French psychology in the first half of the 20th century He was elected an international honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1932 a member of the United States National Academy of Sciences in 1938 and an international member of the American Philosophical Society in 1940 TheoriesJanet was one of the first people to allege a connection between events in a subject s past life and their present day trauma and coined the words dissociation and subconscious His study of the magnetic passion or rapport between the patient and the hypnotist anticipated later accounts of the transference phenomenon The 20th century saw Janet developing a grand model of the mind in terms of levels of energy efficiency and social competence which he set out in publications including Obsessions and Psychasthenia 1903 and From Anguish to Ecstasy 1926 among others In its concern for the construction of the personality in social terms this model has been compared to the social behaviorism of George Herbert Mead something which explains Lacan s early praise of Janet who demonstrated so admirably the signification of feelings of persecution as phenomenological moments in social behaviour Developmental hierarchy Janet established a developmental model of the mind in terms of a hierarchy of nine tendencies of increasingly complex organisational levels He detailed four lower tendencies rising from the reflexive to the elementary intellectual two middle tendencies involving language and the social world and three higher tendencies the rational ergotic world of work and the experimental and progressive tendencies According to Janet neurosis could be seen as a failure to integrate or a regression to earlier tendencies and he defined subconsciousness as an act which has kept an inferior form amidst acts of a higher level Janet also introduced the concept of idee fixe during his research and dialogues with patients Here the subconscious is considered the root of all hysterical manifestations It constitutes the nucleus of the second state of personality which he called as etat second Influence on depth psychologyPierre Janet by DornacWilliam James In his 1890 essay The Hidden Self William James wrote of P Janet s observations of hysterical somnambulist patients at Havre Hospital detailed in Janet s 1889 doctorate of letters thesis De l Automatisme Psychologique James made note of various aspects of automatism and the apparent multiple personalities two selves of patients variously exhibiting trances subconscious states or alcoholic delirium tremens James was apparently fascinated by these manifestations and said How far the splitting of the mind into separate conciousnesses may obtain in each one of us is a problem P Janet holds that it is only possible where there is an abnormal weakness and consequently a defect of unifying or coordinating power citation needed Freud Controversy over whose ideas came first Janet s or Sigmund Freud s emerged at the 1913 Congress of Medicine in London Prior to that date Freud had freely acknowledged his debt to Janet particularly in his work with Josef Breuer writing for example of the theory of hysterical phenomena first put forward by P Janet and elaborated by Breuer and myself He stated further that we followed his example when we took the splitting of the mind and dissociation of the personality as the centre of our position but he was also careful to point out where the difference lies between our view and Janet s Writing in 1911 of the neurotic s withdrawal from reality Freud stated Nor could a fact like this escape the observation of Pierre Janet he spoke of a loss of the function of reality and as late as 1930 Freud drew on Janet s expression psychological poverty in his work on civilisation However in his report on psychoanalysis in 1913 Janet argued that many of the novel terms of psychoanalysis were only old concepts renamed even down to the way in which his own psychological analysis preceded Freud s psychoanalysis This provoked angry attacks from Freud s followers and thereafter Freud s own attitude towards Janet cooled In his lectures of 1915 16 Freud said that for a long time I was prepared to give Janet very great credit for throwing light on neurotic symptoms because he regarded them as expressions of idees inconscientes which dominated the patients However after what Freud saw as his backpedalling in 1913 he said I think he has unnecessarily forfeited much credit The charge of plagiarism stung Freud especially In his autobiographical sketch of 1925 he denied firmly that he had plagiarized Janet and as late as 1937 he refused to meet Janet on the grounds that when the libel was spread by French writers that I had listened to his lectures and stolen his ideas he could with a word have put an end to such talk but did not A balanced judgement might be that Janet s ideas as published did indeed form part of Freud s starting point but that Freud subsequently developed them substantively in his own fashion Jung Carl Jung studied with Janet in Paris in 1902 and was much influenced by him for example equating what he called a complex with Janet s idee fixe subconsciente Jung s view of the mind as consisting of an indefinite because unknown number of complexes or fragmentary personalities built upon what Janet in Psychological Automatism called simultaneous psychological existences Jung wrote of the debt owed to Janet for a deeper and more exact knowledge of hysterical symptoms and talked of the achievements of Janet Flournoy Freud and others in exploring the unconscious Adler Alfred Adler openly derived his inferiority complex concept from Janet s Sentiment d incompletude and the two men cited each other s work on the issue in their writings PublicationsIn 1923 Janet wrote a definitive text on suggestion La medecine psychologique and in 1928 32 published several definitive papers on memory His two volume Obsessions et la psychastenie also proposed more than 60 different kinds of obsessions While Janet did not publish much in English the 15 lectures that he gave at Harvard Medical School between 15 October and the end of November 1906 were published in 1907 as The Major Symptoms of Hysteria He received an honorary doctorate from Harvard University in 1936 Of his great synthesis of human psychology Henri Ellenberger wrote that this requires about twenty books and several dozen of articles See alsoAlfred Binet Henri Bergson Henri Ey Henri Pieron Jean Piaget Josiah Royce Loevinger s stages of ego developmentReferencesGraham F Reed Janet Pierre in Richard Gregory ed The Oxford Companion to the Mind 1987 p 397 Blunden Andy 2012 Concepts A Critical Approach Leiden BRILL p 211 ISBN 978 90 04 22847 4 Foschi Renato Innamorati Marco 2022 A Critical History of Psychotherapy Volume 1 From Ancient Origins to the Mid 20th Century New York NY Taylor amp Francis ISBN 978 1 000 76750 6 Rich Grant J Gielen Uwe 2015 Pathfinders in International Psychology Charlotte NC IAP p 55 ISBN 978 1 68123 144 0 Zuylen Marina Van 2018 Monomania The Flight from Everyday Life in Literature and Art Ithaca NY Cornell University Press pp 21 22 ISBN 978 1 5017 1745 1 E Roudinesco Jacques Lacan 2005 p 16 21 Pierre Marie Felix Janet American Academy of Arts amp Sciences 9 February 2023 Retrieved 2023 05 01 Pierre Janet www nasonline org Retrieved 2023 05 01 APS Member History search amphilsoc org Retrieved 2023 05 01 O L Zangwill Hypnotism history of in Gregory ed p 332 Henri F Ellenberger The Discovery of the Unconscious 1970 p 147 and p 406 Peter Gay Freud A Life for Our Time 1988 p 50 Ellenberger p 386 Ellenberger p 405 406 Jacques Lacan Ecrits A Selection 1997 p 17 Reed p 398 Ellenberger p 387 394 Red p 398 Quoted in Ellenberger p 387 Evans Martha 2019 Fits and Starts A Genealogy of Hysteria in Modern France Ithaca New York Cornell University Press p 58 ISBN 978 0 8014 2643 8 James William 1890 The Hidden Self Scribner s Magazine Vol 7 Issue 3 361 373 Retrieved March 30 2014 a href wiki Template Cite journal title Template Cite journal cite journal a Cite journal requires journal help Janet Pierre 1899 De l Automatisme Psychologique Of Psychological Automatism in French Retrieved March 31 2014 Ellenberger p 817 Sigmund Freud On Metapsychology PFL 11 p 52 Sigmund Freud Five Lectures on Psycho Analysis 1995 p 25 33 Freud Metapsychology p 35 Sigmund Freud Civilization Society and Religion PFL 12 p 306 307 Sigmund Freud Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis PFL 1 p 296 Freud Sigmund An Autobiographical Study WW Norton and Company 1989 page 11 Quoted in Ernest Jones The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud 1964 p 633 Ellenberger p 539 540 Gay p 198 Ellenberger p 149 Quoted in Neville Symington Narcissism A New Theory 1993 p 20 Ellenberger p 406 C Jung The Practice of Psychotherapy 1993 p 112 and p 139 Reed p 398 O Brachfeld Inferiority Feeling in the Individual and the Group 2000 p 53 Ellenberger p 387 Further readingBrooks III J I 1998 The eclectic legacy Academic philosophy and the human sciences in nineteenth century France Newark University of Delaware Press Carroy J amp Plas R 2000 How Pierre Janet used pathological psychology to save the philosophical self Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 36 231 240 Foschi R 2003 La Psicologia Sperimentale e Patologica di Pierre Janet e la Nozione di Personalita 1885 1900 Medicina amp Storia 5 45 68 Johnson George M Dynamic Psychology in Modernist British Fiction Palgrave Macmillan U K 2006 LeBlanc A 2001 The Origins of the Concept of Dissociation Paul Janet his Nephew Pierre and the Problem of Post hypnotic Suggestion History of Science 39 57 69 LeBlanc A 2004 Thirteen Days Joseph Delboeuf versus Pierre Janet on the Nature of Hypnotic Suggestion Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 40 123 147 Lombardo G P Foschi R 2003 The Concept of Personality between 19th Century France and 20th Century American Psychology History of Psychology vol 6 133 142 ISSN 1093 4510 doi 10 1037 1093 4510 6 2 123 Serina F 2020 Janet Schwartz Ellenberger the history of a triangular relationship through their unpublished correspondence History of Psychiatry 31 1 p 3 20 doi 10 1177 0957154X19877601External linksWikisource has original works by or about Pierre Janet Wikimedia Commons has media related to Pierre Janet About Pierre Janet Short biography Bibliographic site Reading guide Autobiography of his early years Pierre Janet amp the Reality Function JANETIAN STUDIES electronic journal of the Institut Pierre JanetWorks of Pierre Janet Psychological Automatism Essay of Experimental Psychology on the Lower Forms of Human Activity Doctorate of Science thesis of Pierre Janet La Medecine Psychologique Important book by Pierre Janet It clarifies what he thought about Suggestion PDF download in French Books by Pierre Janet on line in French Works by Pierre Janet at LibriVox public domain audiobooks
