Ask who discovered the unconscious and most people will say Freud. But the word “subconscious,” and the idea that parts of the mind can split off and operate outside awareness, come from a French contemporary who used hypnosis as his main research tool. For much of the twentieth century he was almost forgotten.
A philosopher turned doctor
Pierre Janet was born in Paris on 30 May 1859. He trained first as a philosopher and went to teach in the port city of Le Havre. There, looking for a thesis subject, he began visiting the local hospital and studying patients under hypnosis.
His most famous subject was a woman known as Léonie, who had been hypnotized many times before and showed, in trance, what seemed to be distinct personalities, each with its own memories.
In 1889 he presented his doctoral thesis, Psychological Automatism. It made his name. The neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot invited him to run a psychological laboratory at the Salpêtrière hospital in Paris, and Janet went on to qualify in medicine as well.
Psychological automatism
Janet’s starting point was the automatic act: something a person does without awareness or intention. Sleepwalking, automatic writing, a post-hypnotic suggestion carried out without knowing why.
He distinguished two kinds.
- Total automatism, where the whole person is taken over, as in sleepwalking or a hypnotic state.
- Partial automatism, where one part of the mind carries on an activity while the main personality is unaware of it.
The second was the important one. It meant that complex mental activity could go on outside consciousness, with its own memory and purpose.
Dissociation and the subconscious
Janet gave these ideas their names.
Dissociation was his term for the splitting off of ideas, memories or functions from the main stream of consciousness. Normally, he thought, the mind integrates experience into a single whole. Under strain that integration can fail, and some part breaks away.
Subconscious was his word for where such split-off material goes. It is not gone. It continues to operate, and can produce symptoms.
He applied this to hysteria. A paralysed arm or a patch of numb skin was not, he argued, damaged. The sensation was still being registered, but by a part of the mind cut off from the person’s awareness. He showed this in experiments in which a patient who could feel nothing in one hand would nonetheless respond to touches on it by automatic writing.
Readers familiar with later research will recognise the pattern. Ernest Hilgard’s “hidden observer” experiments in the 1970s, in which a hypnotized person reported no pain while a “hidden part” reported plenty, were deliberately named neodissociation theory in Janet’s honour.
Trauma
Janet was among the first to connect such symptoms with overwhelming experiences in a person’s past.
He proposed that a frightening event which cannot be absorbed may be stored separately as a fixed idea: a memory that is not integrated into the person’s life story, yet goes on intruding in the form of symptoms, nightmares or re-enactments.
He distinguished ordinary narrative memory, which is flexible and can be told as a story, from traumatic memory, which is rigid, wordless and replays unchanged. That distinction is recognisable in modern descriptions of post-traumatic stress.
Treatment
Janet used hypnosis to reach dissociated material and bring it back into the person’s awareness. He described a staged approach to treatment that anticipates current practice:
- Stabilisation, building the person’s strength
- Working with the traumatic memories
- Reintegration into ordinary life
He did not always aim for reliving. In one well-known case he used suggestion under hypnosis to alter a patient’s distressing memory image, replacing a horrifying picture with a gentler one.
Janet and Freud
The two men’s ideas overlapped, and they were rivals. Both had studied with Charcot. Janet published first on the role of subconscious fixed ideas, and believed Freud had drawn on his work without due credit. Freud denied it.
Their theories differed in an important way.
- Janet: the mind splits because it is too weak or overwhelmed to hold experience together. Dissociation is a failure of integration.
- Freud: the mind actively pushes unacceptable ideas out of awareness. Repression is a defence.
Freud’s version, with its emphasis on sexuality and conflict, captured the century. Janet’s faded. He carried on working and writing, and died in Paris on 24 February 1947.
The revival
From the 1970s, Janet was rediscovered. The historian Henri Ellenberger devoted a major part of his history of the unconscious to him. Researchers studying trauma and dissociative conditions found that Janet had described much of what they were seeing, and his staged model of treatment is widely cited today.
Cautions for a modern reader
- Léonie and patients like her had been hypnotized for years. How far their “personalities” were shaped by their doctors’ expectations is a real question. The Salpêtrière was the place where patients learned to produce what Charcot expected.
- Altering a memory by suggestion raises ethical problems that Janet’s era did not consider.
- Hypnosis does not retrieve accurate buried memories. It can create false ones. Searching for hidden trauma remains unsafe.
- Dissociation is still debated. Researchers disagree about how literally to take the idea of split-off parts.
What lasts
- Mental activity happens outside awareness.
- Overwhelming experiences can be stored differently from ordinary ones.
- Treatment should stabilise a person before approaching what hurt them.
- The words themselves: dissociation, subconscious.
The bottom line
Janet used hypnosis to show that the mind is not a single unified thing, and that under strain parts of it can come apart. He was eclipsed by a more famous rival, but his ideas survived, and they still shape how dissociation and trauma are understood.
Next in the series: Did the Ancients Use Hypnosis? Sleep Temples and Other Tall Tales
This article is for general information and is not medical advice.