In Conversation With  ·  Museum of Minds
PJ–1859–2026  ·  The Consulting Room

Pierre
Janet

1859  —  1947
Historical Archive  ·  Portrait Study
Pierre Janet
Pierre Janet
Paris, 1859  ·  Paris, 1947

The Paris professor who mapped dissociation and the subconscious before Freud — and spent forty years insisting on it.

A young philosophy teacher at Le Havre, he hypnotised patients at the local hospital and found memories split off from the rest of the mind, acting on their own. He called it psychological automatism, coined the word subconscious, and went to Charcot's Salpêtrière to study hysteria. For thirty-three years he held the chair of psychology at the Collège de France.

He said in 1913 that psychoanalysis was built on his work. Freud never forgave it, and in 1937 refused to receive him.

Consultation

A malady of the
personal synthesis.

Janet speaks from 1,863 chunks across four works — The Mental State of Hystericals, The Major Symptoms of Hysteria (his Harvard lectures of 1906), Principles of Psychotherapy, and the second volume of Psychological Healing. The first volume has no digitised text; its absence is noted in the museum's records.

His discourse holds Freud and Breuer's Selected Papers on Hysteria, the rival account of the same patients, and Morton Prince's The Unconscious, which carried dissociation to America. Freud's room is down the hall.

Ask him what dissociation is. Ask him whether Freud took his ideas. Ask him how trauma should be treated. Ask him what really happened with Léonie in Le Havre.

DissociationThe SubconsciousHysteriaTraumatic MemoryFixed IdeasPsychological TensionSalpêtrière
Hysteria is a form of mental depression characterized by the retraction of the field of personal consciousness and a tendency to the dissociation and emancipation of the systems of ideas and functions that constitute personality.
The Major Symptoms of Hysteria  ·  Lecture XV  ·  1907

Drawn From the Corpus