Pierre Janet: French Neurologist and Psychologist

Life Overview

Pierre Janet was born in Paris in the mid-19th century and taught philosophy at a grammar school before doing volunteer work at a hospital, where he engaged in psychiatric research and published his philosophical thesis, L’automatisme Psychologique, in 1889.

Janet then returned to Paris to continue his study of medicine and came to be regarded as the founder of medical and clinical psychology in France.

Although he was well-regarded in the Anglophonic world in his time, Pierre Janet fell into obscurity in the mid-20th century before his ideas were revived by Henri F. Ellenberger’s The Discovery of the Unconscious in 1970.

Today, he is most regarded for his work on posttraumatic and dissociative disorders, his stance on psychoanalysis, and his ideas on the psychology of action, memory, and personality (Bühler & Heim, 2001).

Fixed Ideas

One important idea in Janet’s psychology is the concept of “fixed ideas,” or the formation of cognitive-emotional complexes.

Janet believed that these fixed ideas could lead to an impairment of mental processes on a biological level.

This impairment, according to Janet, causes not only a constricted field of consciousness but a reduced ability to synthesize ideas at all. In this view, fixed ideas could become subconscious and greatly influence conscious mental activity (Heim & Bühler, 2006).

Janet argued that emotional shocks cause trauma because they prevent people who are not well-prepared from adapting successfully to specific situations. As a result, people are exposed to feelings of fear, rage, sorrow, or incompleteness.

Fixed ideas are distorted memories, experiences, imaginations, or appraisals of a traumatic event. A similar term is a rigid-thought complex, which describes what happens when an individual cannot change their views on or consider alternatives to a situation.

Traumatic Events

Janet believed that responses to a traumatic event are inadequate — and can thus lead to fixed ideas — when the person who was traumatized does not have access to the appropriate tools to allow them to cope with traumatic events (Heim & Bühler, 2006).

Janet argued that the tendencies, or coping mechanisms, people used to deal with an event fell under a hierarchy, with some being more advanced than others.

The lowest of these tendencies were disorganized movements and reflexes. Higher up were social tendencies and language — and higher still, one’s beliefs and rationality.

Janet believed that potentially traumatic events put a force on one’s tendencies. If this force was too strong, lower tendencies would be activated, replacing the incompletely activated higher tendencies. Agitated behavior would result.

When higher tendencies, which cause someone to become personally aware of a traumatic event and find a way to integrate it into their personal biography, break down, fixed ideas emerge in the subconscious.

Janet believed that these fixed ideas lead to dissociative and posttraumatic disorders (Heim & Bühler, 2006). On a broader level, Janet believed that all hysterical illnesses arise from fixed ideas.

Janet and The Development of Psychoanalysis

Pierre Janet is often referred to as the “French Freud.” He developed the idea of psychological analysis, which came to heavily influence Freud’s psychoanalysis.

Janet both predated and continually critiqued Freud’s work. In this critique, Janet often accused Freud of using concepts that he had introduced without attribution (Heim & Bühler, 2001).

Janet considered psychoanalysis to be much more limited in scope than Freud. He believed that it appeared to be valid if a mental illness had an already established sexual source. However, in other situations, he saw it as little more than philosophical speculation.

Janet disputed the view that all mentally ill people have sexual trauma or that sexual trauma is universal. Instead, he argued that empirical evidence indicated that traumatic memories arise from the disorders themselves and cannot explain the disorder alone (Bailey, 1956).

Another difference between Janet’s psychological analysis and Freud’s psychoanalysis is that Janet did not use dream analysis as a way to crucify his interpretations of his patients’ mental states.

Janet ascribed no other meaning to dreams than that manifest in their content. However, he did stress the importance of dreams and therapy, as they can contain clues to the traumatic experiences thought to cause an illness.

Finally, Janet viewed mental trauma in a way fundamentally different from Freud’s. Janet believed that traumatic memories are connected to other mental states and, as a result, can result in some symptoms of mental illness.

Freud’s psychoanalysis, however, contended that traumatic memories and subconscious conceptions are at the root of all mental illness (Bailey, 1956).

Themes