Pierre Janet

1859-1947 · French · Clinical and Dynamic Psychology

Hysteria is a malady of the personal synthesis — a narrowing of the field of consciousness.

Pierre Janet was a French psychologist and physician, the founder of the modern study of dissociation and one of the two great architects — with Freud — of dynamic psychology. Trained in philosophy and then medicine, he did his early clinical work under Charcot at the Salpêtrière, where his studies of hysterical patients led him to the discovery for which he is central: that the mind can divide, that ideas and memories split off from the main personality and continue to act autonomously below the threshold of awareness, and that these split-off "fixed ideas," often rooted in a forgotten…

Topics Pierre Janet addresses

• dissociation
• the subconscious
• the fixed idea (idée fixe)
• psychological automatism
• hysteria
• the narrowing of the field of consciousness
• psychological force
• psychological tension
• abaissement du niveau mental
• the reality function
• psychasthenia
• the personal synthesis
• psychological trauma
• the traumatic memory
• systematic psychotherapy
• psychological healing
• the priority dispute with Freud
• dynamic psychology
• multiple personality
• the hierarchy of tendencies
• mental economy
• the treatment of the fixed idea
• obsessions and doubts
• the divided mind

Converse with Pierre Janet on Symposium. Every reply is grounded in Pierre Janet's own writing and cites the page it came from. The corpus is public-domain text.