Pierre Janet

French psychiatrist

• Born: May 30, 1859
• Birthplace: Paris, France
• Died: February 24, 1947
• Place of death: Paris, France

Janet is best known for his work in bringing together clinical psychiatry and academic psychology. He integrated his systematic observations of neurotic disorders, in the description of which he coined the term “subconscious,” with more general psychological concepts concerning behavior patterns and thought processes. He has had a considerable impact on psychiatry through his influence on Carl Jung, Alfred Adler, and, to some extent, Sigmund Freud.

Early Life

Pierre Janet (pyehr zheh-neh) was born in Paris, the city that was his spiritual and cultural home, and, except for seven years of his life, his geographic home as well. He came from an upper-middle-class Parisian family, which included among its members a number of influential lawyers, engineers, and scholars. Janet was the eldest of three children born to Fanny and Jules Janet. His mother, for whom he developed a deep and lifelong affection, was a warm and sensitive woman and a devout Roman Catholic. His father, apparently very kind but shy and seclusive, worked most of his life as a legal editor. Another notable family influence was Pierre’s uncle Paul Janet, who became a prominent philosopher and who provided Pierre with a model of professional orientation and achievement.

During his childhood, Janet became very interested in the natural sciences, especially botany, and at an early age showed an enthusiasm for collecting plants. As he commented in an autobiographical article many years later, “this passion determined my taste for dissection, precise observation, and classification, which should have made a naturalist or physiologist of me.” Other tendencies were also working in him, however, ones that precluded a single-minded pursuit along the path of pure science. Perhaps in part through the influence of his mother, Janet displayed an intense interest in religious questions and concerns. A period of depression through which Janet suffered at the age of fifteen was in part a religious crisis, and religious motivations molded much of his life’s work.

Janet pursued his philosophical interests at the École Normale Supérieure from 1879 until 1882. However, though the primary focus of his education there was philosophy, he studied science and medicine in his spare time, benefiting from the guidance and encouragement of his uncle Paul, who always urged him to combine medical and philosophical studies. The integration of these interests led him naturally to the study of psychology.

Life’s Work

At the age of twenty-two, Janet was appointed professor of philosophy at the Lyceum in the city of Le Havre, where he taught for more than six years. During this period, he also continued his informal studies of scientific subjects by doing volunteer work at the hospital in Le Havre and by pursuing independent psychiatric research. Through this research, Janet was hoping to find a topic on which to write his doctoral thesis and had settled on the subject of hallucinations and their relation to the processes of perception. He approached a well-known Le Havre physician with the idea, hoping that this doctor might know of a suitable patient for him to study. Though the doctor was not aware of any patients at that time who were suffering from hallucinations, he suggested that Janet could study another patient, whose case was considered far more interesting. This patient’s name was Léonie, and she was known to possess powers of clairvoyance and mental suggestion, as well as the ability to be hypnotized from a distance.

Janet’s experiments with Léonie began in 1885 and continued for several years, attracting the interest of both the scientific community and the popularizers of psychic phenomena. The latter group interpreted his findings irresponsibly, to Janet’s chagrin, while the former group recognized and respected Janet’s careful experimental methods. During the course of these investigations, Janet had realized the necessity of taking copious and meticulous notes on everything that happened and that was said, both by his patient and by himself, during the experimental sessions. He continued this practice throughout all of his future clinical work; he relied so heavily on his written notes, distrusting any speculations or unwarranted generalizations that departed from them, that he dubbed his psychology the “psychology of the fountain pen.” This research, along with his studies of “hysterical” women conducted at the Le Havre hospital, formed the basis of his thesis entitled L’Automatisme psychologique (1889; psychological automatism), for which he received his doctorate in philosophy from the Sorbonne in 1889 and which had a significant impact on psychiatric thinking. It was in this work that Janet introduced the term “subconscious” to describe those thought processes that reveal themselves in the delayed and automatic performance of posthypnotic suggestions.

Janet realized, however, that he would not be able to pursue his research in psychopathology professionally unless he obtained the M.D. degree. He therefore undertook medical studies between 1889 and 1893, during which time he continued teaching philosophy in Paris. In 1890, Jean Martin Charcot, in an effort to incorporate experimental psychology into the research program of his world-renowned neurological clinic at the Salpětrière Hospital, established a psychological laboratory and selected Janet as its supervisor. There Janet studied many patients suffering from hysteria and attempted to organize the multitude of clinical facts he had collected into a systematic whole. This work resulted in his medical thesis, L’État mental des hystériques (1892-1894; The Mental State of Hystericals , 1901), for which he was awarded the M.D. and which became his best-known book. The year after his graduation, Janet married Marguerite Duchesne, a Le Havre native who had since settled in Paris. They had three children, Hélène, Fanny, and Michel.

Janet continued to teach philosophy until 1898, having published a textbook of philosophy in 1894. As a result of his increased qualifications and reputation in psychology and psychiatry, he also began to assume teaching responsibilities in these fields. He was asked by Théodule Ribot, who is considered the founder of French psychology, to replace him temporarily as professor of experimental psychology at the Collège de France from 1895 to 1897, and again in 1900 and 1901. Then, in 1902, Janet was appointed Ribot’s successor in the chair of psychology, a position he held until 1935.

As Janet remarked in his autobiography, the circumstances of his professional responsibilities placed him between philosophers and physicians. This rather unusual positioning was the source of a certain frustration for him because he noticed that these two groups were speaking such different theoretical languages that it was difficult for him to converse on professional matters with both of them at the same time, and almost impossible for them to understand each other. The gulf that existed between the world of philosophy and the world of science and medicine became even more obvious to Janet during his early years of teaching psychology, the field that he thought should represent a unification of these realms. Whereas Ribot’s teaching of experimental psychology and psychopathology had been almost purely theoretical, with little basis in clinical experience, one of Janet’s primary concerns was to ground all discussions of psychology and psychiatry in the data of carefully recorded clinical observations. He also worked to develop a terminology through which the more theoretical and purely academic teachers of psychology could be united, or at least engage in fruitful communication with, the more practical and clinical practitioners.

Janet’s efforts at synthesis and unification are evident in his system of psychology, which he described as a “psychology of conduct.” He believed that for psychology to be truly scientific it must be based on externally observable facts. He therefore considered visible behavior the fundamental phenomena and saw intellectual operations as internal forms of behavior. By his emphasis on behavior, Janet hoped to construct a conceptual system that would encompass all types of psychological processes, from the lowest and most simple to the highest and most complex. (His psychology differed from the behaviorism developed in the United States by its recognition of the existence and importance of consciousness.) Janet proposed, therefore, that if action is taken as fundamental, thinking, for example, can be considered inner language an economical reduction and reproduction in consciousness of language behavior that was originally action in the external world.

Janet’s theories of personality and psychotherapy were also informed by the concept of action. He proposed that the human personality consists of a dynamic interplay of “tendencies,” or dispositions to perform particular actions, which exist in a stratified order revealing their phylogenetic and ontogenetic evolution from the more primitive processes such as pain, anger, and sex to the higher and more recent processes such as thinking and believing. The lower tendencies are endowed with a large amount of energy, while the higher tendencies possess less energy but more of what Janet termed “psychological tension,” a cohesive force that reflects the degree of integration of the psychological operations. Personality is thus seen as a shifting and dynamic organization of forces, and psychological well-being as based on a balance between psychological energy and psychological tension. Psychotherapy, then, is a means of establishing, or regaining, this balance. The emphasis Janet placed on the present distribution and organization of energy in the personality, and on the integrating and illuminating function of the higher mental tendencies, serves to distinguish his approach to psychopathology from that of Sigmund Freud, who focused on the influence of past experience and on interpreting the veiled messages of the lower, unconscious processes.

During the last decades of his life, Janet continued to develop and to publish in a number of books the details of his psychology of conduct, always being careful to let the data of clinical observations guide the development of his theories. He presented sparkling and spirited lectures in numerous countries, speaking several times in the United States, and his influence was felt around the world. He died on February 24, 1947, at the age of eighty-seven, leaving unfinished a book on the psychology of belief.

Significance

Janet occupied, both by historical accident and by personal inclination and professional training, a position at the convergence of a variety of streams of thought. The diversity of his interests is revealed in the range of his writings, which cover, in addition to the topics mentioned above, everything from alchemy and alcoholism to “social excitation in religion” and the psychology of time. However, he was not content to deal with these topics in isolation from one another; he always sought a way of understanding and acting that would bring a measure of order and unity to the apparent diversity of the world. His mind was fertilized with the ideas of evolution, neurology and physiology, and unconscious processes. When these intellectual seeds took hold in the soil of Janet’s deep metaphysical tendencies, they blossomed into a unified yet variegated system of thought.

The immense scope of the synthesis Janet was trying to accomplish prohibits any easy categorization of his work and has perhaps served to diffuse its impact. Many great psychologists, however, including Freud, Carl Jung, and Alfred Adler, have mentioned their indebtedness to particular aspects of Janet’s work, and though the name of Janet is often forgotten amid the success surrounding the systems of these thinkers, he stands with them at the threshold of modern dynamic psychiatry.

Bibliography

Boring, Edwin Garrigues. A History of Experimental Psychology. 2d ed. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1950. A standard account of the development of experimental psychology. Discusses Janet’s and his colleagues’ contributions.

Buhler, Karl-Ernst, and Gerhard Heim. “General Introduction to the Psychotherapy of Pierre Janet.” American Journal of Psychotherapy 55, no. 1 (2001): 74. Examines the concept of psychological analysis (or analyse psychologique), including Janet’s criticism of Sigmund Freud and the difference between Janet’s idea of psychological analysis and Freud’s concept of psychoanalysis.

Ellenberger, Henri F. The Discovery of the Unconscious: The History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry. New York: Basic Books, 1970. A substantial and detailed study of the development of dynamic psychiatry. Chapter 6 is devoted to Janet and provides perhaps the most extensive discussion of his life and personality, his philosophical and psychological work, his intellectual precursors and contemporaries, and his influence. Contains many illustrations of the major figures in the history of modern psychiatry.

Ey, Henri. “Pierre Janet: The Man and His Work.” In Historical Roots of Contemporary Psychology, edited by Benjamin B. Wolman. New York: Harper & Row, 1968. Written by a leading French psychiatrist and former student of Janet, this chapter provides good summaries of Janet’s major works and a discussion of his principal psychological and psychopathological concepts.

Janet, Pierre. “Autobiography.” In A History of Psychology in Autobiography, edited by Carl Murchison. Vol. 1. Worcester, Mass.: Clark University Press, 1930. Janet’s reluctant autobiographical article outlines some of the formative influences and significant events of his life.

Laffey, John. Imperialism and Ideology: An Historical Perspective. Montreal: Black Rose Books, 2000. This history of imperialism and how it is driven by ideology includes the chapter “Economy, Society, and Psyche: The Case of Pierre Janet.”

Mayo, Elton. Some Notes on the Psychology of Pierre Janet. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1948. Intended as a guide to Janet’s views on selected subjects, such as psychopathology and social study, hysteria and hypnosis, and the psychology of adaptation, especially as they relate to problems in social and industrial psychology.

Taylor, W. S. “Obituary of Janet.” American Journal of Psychology 60 (October, 1947): 637-645. This article gives an overview of Janet’s life and work and includes a list of his varied publications.

Valsiner, Jaan, and René van der Veer. The Social Mind: Construction of the Idea. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000. The authors examine the social aspects of the intellect through the work of Janet and three other theorists. The chapter on Janet explores his “world of tensions.”

Zuylen, Marina van. Monomania: The Flight from Everyday Life in Literature and Art. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2005. This fascinating work explores human obsessions to overcome the arbitrariness of daily life. Includes the chapter “Pierre Janet: The Phobia of Everyday Life.” The book’s introduction opens with a discussion of Janet’s influence on what can be called a “poetics of everyday life,” that is, a philosophical analysis of life’s ambiguities.