Janet was also influenced by Charcot as Freud was. Born in 1959, Janet was three years younger than Freud. Initially he majored in philosophy in Le Havre in France, and as a subject of his study he was introduced to a patient with dissociative disorder. He wrote a doctoral dissertation “L'Automatisme psychologique” based on his clinical research from 1882 to 1888, that got a wide attention from the French academia. What Janet dealt with in his paper was somnambulism, automatic writing, switching of personalities and so on. In the mean time, Charcot’s paper was published that asserted scientific basis of hypnosis, that caught Janet’s attention. Charcot then invited Janet to be a staff at the Salpêtrière Hospital in 1989.
Later Janet got medical training at Salpêtrière and became a medical doctor in 1893. His apparent smooth sailing in his professional career got arrested when his protector Charcot suddenly died on a trip in 1993. In this context Janet was obliged to leave Salpêtrière and began to teach at Sorbonne or College de France. He later published his major work “La médecine psychologique” in 1923. Janet was reportedly critical of some of Charcot’s work on hysteria. Janet died in 1947, surviving Freud by several years.
Janet’s theory was very different from that of psychoanalysis. It was non-dynamic, in that it sought to describe dissociation in a biological and objective manner.
Janet divided the activities of human mind into two types. One maintains and reproduces the past. The other is future-oriented and engages in synthesis and creation. Usually these two types coordinate with each other, but according to Janet, it is the latter type of activities which forms the present experiences. Janet defined hysteria as a condition in which synthesis and creation is diminished and called it automatisme psychologique (psychological automatism). Janet considers that it is the prototype of dissociation.
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