Pierre Janet

JANET, Pierre (born 1859), a prominent French psychologist and psychopathologist, professor of psychology at the Collège de France. A philosopher by training, Janet became interested in problems of pathological psychology under the influence of Charcot, with whom he began his scientific career at the Salpêtrière as head of the psychological laboratory. Janet's major works, which brought him worldwide renown, include: L'automatisme psychologique (Paris, 1889; has a Russian translation); L'état mental des hystériques (Paris, 1894); Névroses et idées fixes (Paris, 1898; Russian translation, St. Petersburg, 1903); Les obsessions et la psychasthénie (Paris, 1903); the latter two works were written in collaboration with F. Raymond. Janet compiled the results of all these studies in a small, engagingly written book, Névroses (Paris, 1909; has a Russian translation). Later, Janet moved on to the elaboration of general psychology problems, each time, however, choosing pathological phenomena as the starting points of his research work. Recently, he has published studies on 'inner speech' (Le langage intérieur) and on memory (L'évolution de la mémoire et de la notion du temps, Paris, 1928). Janet's main merits are: the confirmation, on a vast body of factual material, of the idea of the predominantly psychic origin of morbid phenomena observed in 'neuroses'; the clarification of the role of 'unconscious' mechanisms in mental life; an attempt to create a structural conception of personality (based on the theory of the hierarchical subordination of mental functions); and finally, the isolation and description of a distinct neurosis—'psychasthenia.' Janet coined the concept of the 'splitting off' (in hysterics) of individual mental complexes from the integral unity of the personality, which was widely used later by Freud and Bleuler. In this respect, he is a precursor of psychoanalysis, with which, however, he disagrees in almost everything else. His disagreement with the latter is especially important in the assessment of the driving forces of human behavior: while Freud puts drives and affects in the foreground, Janet is a strict intellectualist. In the origin of neuroses, Janet attributes a major role to the inadequate adaptation of the personality to the conditions of its existence, as well as to a delay in one way or another of its mental development, which makes the psyche of neurotics akin to the childish or primitive mind, which of course does not coincide at all with the Freudian theory of regression to libidinal experiences of childhood. A fruitful role, not only in the psychology of neuroses but also in the understanding of psychopathological phenomena in general (e.g., in schizophrenia), was played by Janet's introduced concept of the weakening of mental tone (in psychasthenics) with the resulting 'loss of the feeling of reality.' Janet's epistemological views, closely related to some of his psychological theories (e.g., on the perception of time), lean toward the subjective-idealist trend: Janet believes that time and space are not only forms but also constructions of the human spirit; a view of this kind, essentially Kantian, is in sharp contradiction to the materialist view of space and time as objective forms of the existence of moving matter.