fundamental and relevant ideas and memories from the unconscious. Retrieval of unconscious material is best achieved if the patient is placed in a heightened emotional state. Moreover, the most important material in the mind is revealed, as it were, by excavation: the upper strata contain fewer riches than those laid down at an earlier time. Systematic improvement will be associated with the dissolution of pernicious ideas and memories of increasing priority. In the same case history Janet wrote: ‘in the human mind, nothing ever gets lost’.
Janet’s reputation had begun to spread beyond the city within a city. The intellectual climate of the time favoured a general interest in the mind and its secrets. Inevitably, the literature of the day reflected this trend and began to explore psychological themes. Marcel Prévost, a famous contemporary writer, chose to make psychotherapy a principal feature of his 1893 novel
The Autumn of a Woman.
A central character in this work is Dr Daumier, a young neurologist practising at the Salpêtrière (who is also a gifted psychotherapist). The methods he employs to treat his patients borrow much from Janet. Moreover, his mannerisms and style of speech are believed to resemble Janet’s. In all likelihood, Dr Daumier
is
Janet. Regardless of his retiring nature, the Salpêtrière constituted too small a bushel to conceal Janet’s brilliance.
In the 1880s and 1890s becoming a doctor was a relatively undemanding business and, for Janet, required hardly any effort at all. On account of his prior academic training and experience, Janet was afforded many exemptions. Thus, he was able to sit his final examinations on 31 May 1893. He presented his MD thesis a few months later. Predictably, he graduated with honours. Moreover, Charcot (who was always interested in experimental psychology) created a laboratory at the Salpêtrière for the purpose of conducting psychological experiments. He gave it to Janet to run. In Charcot’s eyes, Janet had clearly lived up to all of his early promise. A remarkable achievement, given that it was only eight years earlier that Janet’s first major paper on Madame B was read at the Société de Psychologie Physiologique,
Janet’s theory of hysteria was detailed in several academic journals and in his MD thesis (which was published in 1893). In summary, he suggested the following: Hysterical symptoms were due to the presence of thoughts and memories in the unconscious and have a traumatic origin. The traumatic experience is perceived as so overwhelming that it cannot be integrated into the psyche. Memories of the traumatic experience are subsequently ‘split off* from awareness; sometimes to such a degree that months of a patient’s life are consigned to oblivion.
This splitting of the mind is sometimes technically described as
dissociation.
However, these split-off or dissociated portions of mind can still exercise an influence on everyday existence; they ‘return’, to haunt the body, like ghosts, producing inexplicable impulses, anaesthesiae, and re-enactments. With respect to the latter, the individual is like an actor who is driven to perform a scene in the absence of props or other members of the cast. However, these re-enactments might not always be literal. They could, for example, be symbolic. For Janet, the so-called ‘hysterical crisis’ was almost invariably a re-enactment of some kind, albeit a disguised re-enactment. Keeping traumatic memories at bay requires mental energy. Janet believed that this produced what he described as ‘a narrowing of consciousness’.
Janet used the term ‘psychological analysis’ to describe his methods. It is a term that has many contemporary variants, such as psychoanalysis or analytical psychology. However, these latter terms were employed to describe specific schools of psychotherapy associated with specific figureheads. Janet never attempted to form a school of psychotherapy. Moreover, he never used
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