Janet, Pierre-Marie-Felix

   (1859–1947)

   Known for the introduction in France of medical psychotherapy and for coining the term "psychasthenia," Janet was born in Paris but grew up in the provinces, the son of a legal editor and nephew of a wellknown professor of philosophy at the Sorbonne. In 1879, he was admitted to the École Normale Supérieure, an elite teacher-training institution, and after passing the Agrégation in 1882, he taught high school for a number of years. In search of a subject for a doctoral dissertation, he discovered psychology and began interviewing patients, giving an initial paper in 1885 on hypnosis and somnambulism. (Writing a dissertation in 1889 on "psychological automatism," at the time he was interested in such phenomena as multiple personality; he had already published a major article on "the doubling of personality" in 1886.)

   In November 1889, Janet began medical school and was taken under Jean-Martin Charcot’s wing; Charcot created for Janet a laboratory for the study of experimental psychology at the Salpêtrière hospice and presided over the examination in 1893 of Janet’s medical thesis on the psychology of hysteria. In 1897, Janet left the Salpêtrière and quit the high school posts where he simultaneously had been teaching to take the chair of experimental psychology at the Sorbonne; from there, he progressed in 1902 to the Collège de France. Janet continued to practice medicine on the side and until 1942 consulted at the Ste.-Anne mental hospital. Janet initiated medical psychotherapy in France in his 1893 book on the Mental State of Hysterics (L’état mental des hystériques), where he considered the utility of "suggestion," meaning hypnotic and nonhypnotic psychotherapy; he is also remembered for his coinage of the term "psychasthenia," a variety of neurasthenia for which Janet postulated the mechanism of lowered brain energy leading to "abulia" (meaning loss of will-power). (Some authorities, however, consider neurasthenia to be emotional hyperesthesia, whereas they view psychasthenia as intellectual weakness of some kind.) For Janet, the concept of psychasthenia included almost all psychiatric symptoms except hysteria. His two-volume work on Obsessions and Psychasthenia was published in 1903.