Janet, Pierre

Category: Healer

 

Pierre Marie Félix Janet (30 May 1859 – 24 February 1947) was a pioneering French psychologist, philosopher and psychotherapist.  His principal interest was in attempting to build up a sound body of observational data of the ‘mentally ill’, from which he could deduce theories of academic psychology, which in turn could then be used in clinical treatment, that is, in the treatment of mental illnesses.  As such he was instrumental in developing applied psychology. 

Janet introduced the words dissociation and subconscious into psychological terminology and also developed a number of models of the mind, all built using the data from his patients, which incorporated the subconscious as well as ‘higher levels’. 

Janet gives the impression of being a very kind and concerned doctor, one who wished to give all his patients, rich or poor an equal treatment.  He also had a sense of humour!

Henri Lamy (1864-1909), Pierre Janet et Adolphe Dutil en 1892

Spiritual interests and mystic pursuits

Although Janet’s father, Jules Janet, was a Paris lawyer, his mother, Fanny Hummel, was a devout Catholic from Alsace from whom he developed an interest in the ‘world beyond’. Janet was as a consequence, extremely interested in telepathy, mind to mind communication, as well as remote viewing and out of body states.   

In effect, Janet channelled his interest in mysticism into areas like Models of the mind, and the functions of the mind.  All that underpinned spiritual experience.

Work

 

Pierre Janet was born in Paris on May 30, 1859, to an upper middle class family. He maintained a distinguished academic standing in the finest French schools, dividing his interests between science and philosophy. Two events had a profound effect upon him. The first, in 1881, was the International Electrical Exposition in Paris, where it became clear that the future would be dominated by science, technology and electricity. The second, in 1882, was the publication of Charcot's paper, which reestablished the scientific status of hypnosis

Janet became Professor of Philosophy at the Lycée at Havre at the age of 22.  Janet worked as teacher in both the lycées of Châteauroux and Havre from 1882-1889.

 

The experiments that Gibert showed Janet and that he himself reproduced on Léonie, in particular the ‘provocation of hypnotism from a distance’, resulted in him meeting Jean-Martin Charcot, Charles Richet and people from the Society for Psychical Research in London, including Frederick Myers, and Henry Sidgwick.   It was Janet's report (1882) of an unusual case of hypnosis and clairvoyance that gained him the attention of Charcot.

Some joint experiments with these people produced some very interesting results: ‘16 times out of 20 somnambulism has exactly coincided with a mental suggestion made at a distance of one kilometer’.

The SPR did not play entirely fair with Janet and published these results without asking him, giving their own interpretations, which inevitably attracted a hostile response from other scientists:

Very little is made these days of just how much meticulous work went into the recording of all the observations on which Janet’s later theories were based, this is science at its best:

 

The observations on these patients and Leonie in particular contributed to Janet's 1889 Doctorate of Science thesis, De l'Automatisme Psychologique.  He became Dr. ès lettres in 1889 and on the same year, at Charcot's invitation, he became director of the psychological laboratory at the Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital, the largest Paris mental institution.

There he completed his work for his M.D., which he received for the thesis L'état mental des hystériques in 1892, in which he attempted to classify forms of the hysteria neurosis. Charcot, in his introduction to the thesis, concurred with Janet's plea to unite the efforts of psychology and medicine. He now settled as a physician for nervous and mental diseases in Paris. He was not a fan of psychological experiments, believing they were often ‘enough to upset the thing being studied’.

Janet seemed to have a brilliant career ahead when, three weeks after his promotion to Doctor of Medicine, Charcot died suddenly. Many of Charcot's ideas about hypnosis were discarded and Janet was soon the only one in the Salpêtrière using hypnosis in his research and clinical work. He published many studies on hysteria, then turned his attention to another broad category of névroses: psychasthenia with its inherent obsessions, phobias, tics, etc. This resulted in the two volumes on Obsessions and Psychasthenia [see below references]

In 1898 Janet was appointed lecturer in psychology at the Sorbonne, and in 1902 he succeeded Théodule Ribot (1839-1916) in the chair of experimental and comparative psychology at the Collège de France, a position he held until 1936. Meanwhile, the climate at the Salpêtrière worsened for Janet. Déjerine regarded hypnosis as morally reprehensible and in 1910 when Déjerine became Director of the Salpêtrière, Janet, the champion of both hysteria and hypnosis, had to leave.

 

In 1904, with his friend Georges Dumas (1866-1946), he founded the Journal de psychologie normal et pathologique, to which he contributed numerous articles. He was a member of the Institut de France from 1913.

Although not honoured in his own country, Janet was very well received in North and South America where he visited and lectured regularly beginning in 1904. He received an honorary doctorate at Harvard's tricentenary celebration in 1936. His 15 Harvard lectures given to the Harvard Medical School between 15 October and the end of November 1906, were published in 1907 as The Major Symptoms of Hysteria and are currently garnering much attention again.

Areas of study

Hypnosis, hypnotherapy and the powers of suggestion

 

Janet used hypnosis in both his analysis and treatment of mental and emotional disorders, particularly  anxiety and phobias. Janet was also extremely interested in hypnotherapy and the powers of suggestion and its application in both healing and its ability to cause illness.  This has great relevance to this site in areas such as the placebo effect and also the death prayer.  In 1923, Janet wrote a definitive text on suggestion, La médecine psychologique, and in 1928-32 published several definitive papers on memory.

At one time, Janet’s careful work became completely bastardised under the heading ‘psychosomatic illness’.  ‘An illness’, doctors said ‘was all in the mind’ and by implication it was the patient’s fault, they were imagining it.  But Janet never said this, his theory was that negative ideas can be implanted in our mind without us consciously realising it, which subsequently cause illness – types of hurt cause illness. Furthermore we have to be at a low ebb to start with:

So both psychological trauma and physical trauma contribute to illness, which leads us on to the concept of perceptions.

Perceptions and the memories formed from them

Past perceptions and their influence on neuroses

Janet was also one of the first people to notice a connection between events in a patient’s past life [or even lives] and his or her present-day trauma.

In other words, perceptions-  sometimes buried perceptions - have a dramatic influence on a person’s mental state; and past traumas, possibly also completely buried in memory, but fully accessible via perceptions may be having an influence of which one is unaware.

 Although the relationship between Freud and Janet was not exactly convivial later in Freud’s career, Freud openly acknowledged his debt to Janet, a debt which few people may realise had very personal meaning for Freud.  In studying himself and his childhood using regression, Freud realised he may well have been abused as a child, and this was having a perhaps wholly disproportionate effect on his theories regarding sexual repression and abuse.

If all you have is a hammer everything looks like a nail, and to Freud, abused, traumatised and repressed as he himself was, everyone he saw suddenly became a nail like him.

 

This has had some very very unfortunate repercussions.  Pierre Janet was once France's most important student of dissociation and hysteria. At that time, hysteria included a broad range of disorders now categorized in the DSM-III-R (American Psychiatric Association, 1987) as dissociative, somatization, conversion, borderline personality, and post-traumatic stress disorders. Through extensive study, observation and experiments using hypnosis in the treatment of hysteria, Janet discovered that dissociation was the underlying characteristic mechanism present in each of these disorders.

Had Janet published the case histories of Lucie, Marie, Marcelle, Madame D., and the others he had successfully treated at that time, we would have been able to see that the principle method he used to help people was what was later called cathartic therapy.  Connecting people via their emotions to the Higher spirit/the higher realms.

Unfortunately, his view of the importance of dissociation in hysteria and its treatment were abandoned when hypnosis fell into disrepute. And this retreat from hypnosis at the end of the nineteenth century coincided with the publication and popularity of Freud's early psychoanalytic studies. The irony is that the psychiatric community let a seriously psychologically sick man- Freud – dictate the future course of mental illness, whilst ignoring the rigorous scientific approach recommended by the [well] Janet. 

Historically, Janet's considerable body of work was neglected in favour of the rising popularity and acceptance of Freud's psychoanalytical conceptualizations, and this is all they were, for he made few observations, and most of these were tainted by his own problems.

Multiple personality

 

The patients in the Havre Hospital had various problems from mental illness to apparent multiple personalities ("two selves") of patients.  These so-called multiple personalities however, tended to exhibit themselves only during "trance and subconscious states" or alcoholic delirium tremens. True multiple personality is maintained in trance/hypnosis or not; it is a permanent state, whereas these impermanent states might be better viewed as possession – the absence of the personality of the person, is filled by a new personality – a personality incidentally which might be from a person out of body – even in sleep.

He 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 degree in medicine the following year in 1893.

It is worth adding that Carl Jung studied with Janet in Paris in 1902 and was much influenced by him.   Jung's view of the mind as "consisting of an indefinite, because unknown, number of .. fragmentary personalities" built upon what Janet in Psychological Automatism called "simultaneous psychological existences".

This subject, however, still remains a problem area in psychology, principally because a great number of psychologists [mostly of the Freudian persuasion], do not admit the existence of the mind separate from the brain, or for that matter the existence of OBEs or telepathy, whereas Janet did. 

The three worlds

Captiontext

If we look for a moment at our model of the mind, it is split into three:

 –the Higher spirit  - that entity which survives death and from which new Personalities can be spawned at times of trauma in order to handle the traumatic situation.  The Higher spirit is the controller of Perceptions, as such it can both act on trauma and ensure continuity of action as new personalities take over

 –the Conscious mind controlled by  the Ego/Personality – the set of attributes normally provided on birth to enable us to handle our destiny.  The Ego is the seat of consciousness under normal circumstances and is paired with the intellect – memory, will and reason

 - the Subconscious - Although not shown on the model, there is possibility that the subconscious also has its own ‘personality’ – the reptilian mind – as such we are not one but three!

Janet established a developmental model of the mind, which is more complex than ours and described it in terms of a hierarchy of nine "tendencies" of increasingly complex organisational levels.  But he did use the three levels – describing them as

-           four "lower tendencies", rising from the "reflexive" to the "elementary intellectual"; Janet coined the words "subconscious" to mean the parts of the mind that are automatic and inaccessible – emotion, perception and so on

-          two "middle tendencies", involving language and the social world; intellect, learning and memory

-          three "higher tendencies", the "rational-ergotic" world, and the "experimental and progressive tendencies".

As such the models [Janet’s and that on the site] do actually coincide.  According to Janet, neurosis could be seen as a failure to integrate these levels or a tendency to have regressed to the lower tendencies at the expense of the others.  As such, he defined the descent to the subconsciousness as "an act which has kept an inferior form amidst acts of a higher level".

Janet also recognised the two functions shown on our model of remembering [recall from memory] and learning [the method by which memories are made].  Janet called learning 'integration' and recognised the role of synthesis of observation and its integration into the whole.  Integrative activity "reunites more or less numerous given phenomena into a new phenomenon different from its elements. At every moment of life, this activity effectuates new combinations which are necessary to maintain the organism in equilibrium with the changes of the surroundings."

Buried automatic functions

Learnt functions – activities - get stored in memory.  Thus once we learn to ride a bicycle, we don’t need to consciously think about the activity, we can just do it.  But some repetitive and automatic behaviours can have been learnt as a consequence of trauma and as a consequence be detrimental to the person.

As a Ph.D. candidate in philosophy at the University of Paris, Janet studied these automatic acts and in his thesis (1889), which went into many editions, he introduced the concept of automatism, a condition in which an activity is carried out without conscious knowledge by the subject. Janet argued that

For example, Janet wrote of a woman walking on the street. She had short dissociative episodes in which she made a curious jumping motion. In hypnosis Janet discovered that she was reenacting her suicide attempt: a jump into the Seine. In an example of a contraction, a sailor continuously walked in a forward bent position, reenacting the trauma of having had a beam fall and press against his chest.

Depression and the Higher spirit

Janet was possibly the first person to make a study of what we now know as depression

 

Abulia is a concept which receives little attention in current psychiatry and psychology, but describes a degeneration of the will which manifests in tendencies towards indolence, hesitancy, indecision, impotence to act, and inability to focus attention on ideas.

Janet noticed that in people with these problems – ‘the maladies of doubt, the various aboulias, and the feelings of inadequacy (sentiments d'incomplétude)’- their conscious effort was almost totally centred around the input from their 5 senses and the nervous system – a sort of ‘external reality’, to the exclusion of all other forms of input.  Now if we look at the Model of the Mind, we can see that the form of input they are thus not getting is spiritual input of any kind.  In other words the whisper of spiritual input, which is in some senses like the Internet of the spirit realm has been drowned out, and they exist in a ‘stand-alone’ realm of fear feeding on the data from their senses and memory. 

Balance

Janet recognised the existence of a force of energy – a sort of vital force that affected both a person’s health and his or her ability to perform various activities.  He even drew up a ‘list of these costly actions and of the characteristics of the action which modify the expenditure of energy’.

On the whole, Janet believed that most disorders – mental and physical – are more related to the build up of energy which cannot be expended, than in a person lacking in energy, or as he put it “the derivation of energy which is produced when a more or less charged action of high tension cannot be executed”.

There is no indication that Janet had heard of yin and yang, of cooling energy and hot energy which is a well known feature of Chinese medicine, but he accurately predicted that “The psychological problem of the cost of action, of exhaustion by expenditure, of the use of residual energy will later become a paramount problem in psychology and psychiatry although today it is scarcely suspected”.

Death

In 1894 Janet had married Marguerite Duchesne, but despite the fact he had a family, Janet’s scientific and therapeutic work continued up until his death soon after World War II. He had by this time amassed many thousands of clinical records that he filed carefully in a room in his apartment, but every one was destroyed after his death in accordance with his wishes, thinking of his patients and their right to privacy.

References

It is estimated that the published work of this great man, who according to his daughter, did not know the act of rest (Pichot-Janet, 1950), amounted to at least 17,000 printed pages.  Although Janet's dissociation theory has been rediscovered, there is still little awareness of what treasures are hidden in his later work on the psychology of conduct and in his psychopathological studies, such as those on paranoid schizophrenia. Janet's last unfinished work concerning the psychology of religious belief remains unpublished.

• Psychological Automatism (1889) -  Janet's first book in psychology, introduces his dissociation theory and his model of the functional and structural elements of the mind. It describes psychological phenomena observed in hysteria, hypnosis, suggestion, possession states, and Spiritism.
• Obsessions and Psychasthenia (1903) - for several years Janet devoted his studies to tics, insanity, phobias, obsessions, and impulses of all kinds. This series of observations he summarized in numerous articles, and in his books on Les nérvoses et les idées fixes, and terminated in his work on Les obsessions et la psychasténie, 1903.
• Psychology of Conduct  - Janet possessed a remarkable talent for integrating very different materials into a harmonious whole.   One of these results was the formulation of his Psychologie de la conduite, a major effort to synthesize a multitude of behavioural observations with an evolutionary philosophical approach.
• Les stades de liévolution psychologique (1926)- In this book,  Janet presented a hierarchically ordered classification of human activity from simplest to most complex.
• From Anguish to Ecstasy (1928) – this is probably the absolutely key book to read from a spiritual viewpoint.  Janet recognised that many of the ‘higher psychological phenomena’ had an internal spiritual aspect. As a consequence, he introduced a new analysis of consciousness using the concepts of belief, memory, thought, and above all emotions. Janet went on to teach these concepts in his courses on ‘inner thought’ and on the ‘evolution of memory’, and he even developed a notion of time based on perceptions.  These theories were all explained in his two volume, De l'angoisse à l'extase, 1928, which deal with belief and emotions.
  “Thought is inner language; belief becomes a special combination of language and action; memory is above all a system of recounting; emotions are regulations of action, reactions of the individual to his own actions”.
• Médications psychologiques – these three volumes published in 1919, are intended to provide a summary of Janet’s long medical studies on neuroses, psychoses, and their treatment. It provides a review of various methods of psychotherapy; provides an explanation of suggestion, hypnotism, moral catharsis (désinfection morale, liquidation morale) rest, aesthesiogeny, isolation, excitation, and moral direction.
  I have stressed a subject which has always interested me, that of the difficulty of social action. It has not been taken sufficiently into account how much one person by words or his presence alone can modify in one sense or another the psychological tension of another. The problem of religious conduct is closely related to this study of influences, directions, and social excitation.
• Nevroses et ideés fixes - During and after his preparation of The Mental State of Hystericals, Janet published numerous articles in which he presented more detailed descriptions, narratives and analyses of patients. These papers were collected in the first volume of Névroses et Ideés Fixes: Études expérimentales sur les troubles de la volonté, de liattention, de la mémoire; sur les émotions, les ideés obsedantes et leur traitement.  Fixed ideas (ideés fixes) are thoughts or mental images which take on exaggerated proportions, have a high emotional charge, and, in hysterical patients, become isolated from the habitual personality, or personal consciousness. When dominating consciousness, they serve as the basis for behaviour.
• The Major Symptoms of Hysteria - published in English in 1907, contains the 15 lectures Janet delivered at Harvard Medical School in 1906. He even invented thought forms
  'Things happen as if an idea, a partial system of thoughts, emancipated itself, became independent and developed itself on its own account. The result is, on the one hand, that it develops far too much, and on the other hand, that consciousness appears no longer to control it"
  The lectures contain descriptions and comparisons of the different types of somnambulism - that state of mind in which people are so absorbed in their inner experience that congruent contact with external reality is lost.
  Janet also classified multiple personalities according to their intellectual and memory capacities, predating current discoveries in this area by almost 100 years.
• Reader's Guide To Pierre Janet:  A Neglected Intellectual Heritage  - Onno Van der Hart, Ph.D. & Barbara Friedman, M.A., M.F.C.C.  Originally published in DISSOCIATION, 1989, 2(1), 3-16.
• The major symptoms of hysteria. (1907) - Second edition with new matter: 1920. Facsimile of 1920 edition: Hafner, New York, 1965.
• L'Hallucination dans le délire de pérsecution. Revue Philosophique, 113,1, 61-98. (c) - 1932
• Les croyances et les hallucinations. Revue Philosophique, 113,1,278-331. (d) - 1932
• Le langage intérieur dans 1'hallucination psychique. Annales Médico-Psychologiques, 94, II, 377-386. (b) - 1936

Observations

For iPad/iPhone users: tap letter twice to get list of items.

• Janet, Pierre - Healing Achille
• Janet, Pierre - Healing Irène and Justine’s terrifying hallucinations
• Janet, Pierre - L'Automatisme psychologique – False pregnancy brought on by suggestion
• Janet, Pierre - L'Automatisme psychologique – Sight returns to Mary via suggestion
• Janet, Pierre - Névroses et les idées fixes (On neuroses and fixed ideas), - Subliminal memory
• Janet, Pierre - Observing Madeleine
• Vasiliev, Professor L L - Experiments in mental suggestion – On early experiments by French doctors in hypnotising and awakening at a distance – case study on Leonie B; witness Dr. Ochorovicz
• Vasiliev, Professor L L - Experiments in mental suggestion – On early experiments by French doctors in hypnotising and awakening at a distance – case study on Leonie B; witness F W A Myers