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Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, Vol. 36(3), 231–240 Summer 2000
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䉷 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

HOW PIERRE JANET USED PATHOLOGICAL PSYCHOLOGY TO SAVE THE Base of 1st
PHILOSOPHICAL SELF1 line of ART
JACQUELINE CARROY AND RÉGINE PLAS

According to traditional French historiography, French scientific psychology was born

when it differentiated itself from philosophy. This split between the two disciplines is
attributed to Taine and Ribot, who, consequently, are considered to be the “founding
fathers” of French psychology. In this paper we shall examine the case of Pierre Janet,
who, at the turn of the century, was recognized worldwide as the most important French
psychologist. It is generally said that he was the follower of Ribot and of Charcot. How-
ever, he was also Paul Janet’s nephew. Paul Janet was a very well known and influential
philosopher of the so-called French “spiritualistic” school, for which psychology was
central to philosophy. In 1889, Pierre Janet published his doctoral dissertation,
L’Automatisme psychologique, which was immediately considered to be a classic in psy-
chology. We shall argue that this book is as much indebted to the old spiritualistic psy-
chology, which claimed the substantial unity of the self, as to the new psychology at the
time, which questioned it. With Pierre Janet, the split between psychology and philosophy
in France was reconsidered. It would be more accurate to speak in terms of a compromise
between philosophy and the “new” physiological and pathological psychology. 䉷 2000
John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

It is widely accepted among French psychologists that the break with philosophy was a
turning point in the history of French psychology. Only after the break could psychology
aspire to scientific status. Hippolyte Taine and Théodule Ribot’s manifestos of 1870 are often
cited in support of this view. It was also Maurice Reuchlin’s point of view, who defended
the experimental approach to psychology. He was the author of a short popularizing work,
entitled Histoire de la psychologie, which became accepted as authoritative and was for a
long time the only secondary source accessible to psychology students. This work, which
appeared in 1957 and is still in print, legitimized the historiographic viewpoint stemming
from a militant interpretation of the criticisms of metaphysics put forward by Taine and Ribot.2
The introductions to Taine’s De l’intelligence (1870) and Ribot’s La psychologie anglaise
contemporaine (1870) proclaimed the need for psychology to cut itself off from its roots in
philosophy and rely instead on physiology and pathology.
Yet Reuchlin’s historiographic version was never really unanimously accepted in France
or in other French-speaking countries. Many researchers — generally philosophers — con-
tested the work and continued to consider psychology as a branch of philosophy. In 1960,

1. Translated from French by Chris Miller. We should like to thank Diana Faber for her translation of the appendix,
and Jacqui Corseaux for her translation of the additional notes.
2. We must remember that the psychology degree was created in France only in 1947. Formerly, the teaching of
psychology was integrated into the philosophy degree course.

JACQUELINE CARROY is research director in the history of psychology at the École des Hautes
Études en Science Sociales in Paris. She is the author of many articles and of two books: Hypnose
suggestion et psychologie. L’invention de sujets (Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 1991) and Les
personnalités doubles et multiples. Entre science et fiction (Paris, Presses Universitaires de France,
1993).
RÉGINE PLAS is professor in the history of psychology at the Université René Descartes in Paris.
She is the author of many articles and of a book on the origins of French psychology (to be published). short
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for instance, F. L. Mueller brought out a monumental Histoire de la psychologie in which Base of text
Bergson and phenomenology occupied a significant place (Carroy, 1999). Recently, Jan Gold-
stein (1994) and John I. Brooks III (1993, 1998) have disproved the legendary rupture. We
wish to situate the work of Janet in a perspective analogous to this, based on a close reading
of his philosophy manuals.
The principal object of Ribot and Taine’s attack was, in fact, French spiritualist philo-
sophy, to which we shall return. Ribot’s 1873 thesis, L’Hérédité. Étude psychologique, was
clearly intended as a broadside against the spiritualist school, and his thesis was hotly debated
in the Académie des Sciences morales et politiques.3 But Taine and Ribot had not suddenly
seen the light. From their perspective, it was probably more a matter of effecting a compromise
between science and philosophy. The combined medical and philosophical training favored
by French psychologists over the next seventy years testified to the efficacy of this compro-
mise.4
Pierre Janet is generally presented as the founder of this tradition. For several decades,
he enjoyed international renown as a great psychologist. Agrégé in philosophy, in 1889 he
wrote a philosophy thesis entitled L’Automatisme psychologique. To qualify as a doctor of
medicine, in 1893 he presented a medical thesis entitled Contribution à l’étude des accidents
mentaux chez les hystériques.5 A so-called “student” of Ribot and J. H. Charcot, in his training
he embodied an alliance sought by both Ribot, who was not a doctor of medicine, and Charcot,
who was not a philosopher.
Attention has been drawn to the fact that Janet taught philosophy for sixteen years
(1882 – 1898)6 and published a course book of philosophy (Ellenberger, 1970; Prévost, 1973;
Brooks, 1998). But until now no one has explored the link between his twin identities, as
philosopher and teacher, on the one hand, and famous psychologist, on the other. This link
needs to be viewed in the context of cultural history in general and Janet’s intellectual bi-
ography in particular. One cannot, we feel, understand Janet’s intentions in L’Automatisme
psychologique without bearing in mind that it was originally written as a philosophy thesis.
In L’Automatisme psychologique, Janet wrote as a philosopher, and, as Ellenberger noted, his
examiners congratulated him on the fact. Though affiliated with Ribot and Charcot, Janet
was, first and foremost, the nephew of Paul Janet, who was a professor at the Sorbonne and
a leading spiritualist philosopher. Paul Janet was a highly influential figure; he drew up the
syllabus for the sixth-form philosophy option early in the Third Republic and was President
of the Board of Examiners of the Agrégation in Philosophy (Fabiani, 1988). In 1885, he
presented his nephew’s first communication to the Société de psychologie physiologique, and
he was one of the examiners for Pierre Janet’s thesis in 1889.

PAUL JANET AND FRENCH SPIRITUALISM

Before analyzing Pierre Janet’s relation to philosophy, we need to sketch out a context
specific to France. There, under the aegis of spiritualism, psychology was considered a con-

3. These debates were recorded in the Journal Officiel de la République Française (3 December 1873:7418–
7419). They were sufficiently newsworthy for the newspaper Le Temps, the ancestor of today’s Le Monde, to report
on them on 8 December. See also Brooks, 1998, p. 78 and passim.
4. See also Nicolas (in press). For another, rather schematic, point of view, see Mucchielli (1998).
5. This thesis is a part of L’Etat mental des hystériques (1893).
6. Like all French teachers in secondary schools, he began his teaching career in the provinces and was appointed short
to a position in Paris only in 1889. He ended his career in Lycée Condorcet in 1897– 1898. standard
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stitutive part of philosophy, and effectively synonymous with it. Moreover, it is important to Base of text
remember that most of the protagonists of this story shared a professional identity of almost
initiatory character, for they were all agrégés in philosophy and former pupils of the École
Normale Supérieure. Here we touch on a system of elite education specific to France. The
teachers of the French Revolution found the universities excessively clerical in tendency and
replaced them with the grandes écoles. When Napoléon reinstated the universities, the gran-
des écoles survived. Among them was the École Normale Supérieure, which trained secondary
school teachers in Arts and Sciences. Many of these teachers later went on to become aca-
demics. Not only Paul Janet, Hippolyte Taine, and Théodule Ribot, but Henri Bergson, Emile
Durkheim, and, of course, Pierre Janet were products of the École Normale Supérieure. And
all but Taine were also agrégés in philosophy. The agrégation was not a university diploma,
but a nationwide competitive exam of extreme difficulty. Agrégés automatically acquired the
status of secondary teacher, and with it a much-coveted title that, even today, commands
great prestige.
Beginning in the early nineteenth century, an official school of French spiritualist phi-
losophy had grown up. The French term is not synonymous with the English cognate. It
generally refers to the school of psycho-philosophy founded by Victor Cousin. Cousin had
named it eclecticism, claiming to preserve only what was best in any given philosophical
doctrine. His followers, Théodore Jouffroy and Adolphe Garnier, oriented Cousin’s system
toward psychology. The principal influence on them in this effort was Maine de Biran and
the Scottish school, teaching “faculties of the soul.” For these “psychologists,” psychology
was a specific area of knowledge, attained by introspective observation and distinct from both
physiology and ontology. Thanks to the mind’s immediate intuition of itself, it was possible
to experience the unity of self under different states of consciousness. A psychology of
faculties was developed using this method, and scientific claims were made for it. Finally,
this psychology allowed an ontology to be devised on a model attributed to Descartes. The
philosophers based their ontology on the distinction between the spiritual and the material,
or, in nineteenth-century terms, between the moral and the physical. Psychology thus became
the central component of spiritualist philosophy. A school manual published in 1890, for
example, warned philosophy students against “a confusion of which they are often guilty:
psychology is not philosophy, and it is a grave error to use either word indiscriminately in
place of the other” (Hannequin, 1890, p. 3).
Taine and Ribot, in their polemic, asserted that there was no contact between spiritualist
psychology and mental medicine. They were wrong. Garnier was an active member of the
Société Médico-psychologique, the membership of which included a certain number of phi-
losophers and a majority of alienists. Spiritualist psychology lay behind the theory of auto-
matism borrowed by the alienist Jules Baillarger from Jouffroy, and behind Jouffroy lay Pierre
Maine de Biran. Baillarger distinguished two states of mental activity. The first of these allows
us freely to direct our ideas, and was called “voluntary mental exercise.” The second is
“automatism of the intelligence” and was characterized by “involuntary exercise of the mem-
ory and imagination” (Baillarger, 1890, p. 496 and passim). In this state, the faculties operate
spontaneously and present a succession of ideas and images that we cannot control; this
explains both normal phenomena such as reverie and dream and pathological phenomena
such as somnambulism, hallucination, and delirium.
In Britain, at around the same time, Thomas Laycock and William B. Carpenter were
working in the field of cerebral physiology, and their notion of unconscious cerebration was
modelled on the functioning of the spinal cord (Gauchet, 1992). By contrast, French spiritualist short
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and contrasted them with modes of clear consciousness. Consequently, most French “psy- Base of text
chologists,” from Maine de Biran on, were interested in sleep, dreams, and somnambulism.
Paradoxical as it may seem, the psychology that Taine and Ribot attacked had prepared
the ground for them. For the spiritualist school, introspection was the distinctive methodology
of psychology. Auguste Comte denied introspection any claim to scientific status, and by so
doing disqualified psychology itself. Faced with such radical claims, Taine and Ribot were
forced to defend the notion of the autonomy of psychology as a science. They did so by
appealing against the severity of Comte’s condemnation. We agree, essentially, with the subtle
analyses developed by Brooks (1998) in his well-informed book. However, we regret his
choice in describing Taine or Ribot as “positivists,” even in the widest sense of the term
(Brooks, 1998, p. 20), for by doing so, this author could no longer give all his attention to
the dual combat maintained by Taine and Ribot against not only the spiritualists but also the
positivist heirs of Comte, from the time they decided to found a science called psychology.
It was, for instance, extremely revealing that Ribot should have called on J. S. Mill for help
to counter Comte’s refutation of his use of the term “psychology” (Guillin, 1998, p. 91). We
prefer to describe Taine and Ribot as positive psychologists, rather than positivists or social
scientists — a term that had no equivalent in French at this period, and has none today. Thus
Taine, though critical of Jouffroy, at least praised him for having presented psychology as a
“particular science” (Taine, 1857, p. 231).
Like the spiritualists, Taine and Ribot were interested in the various states in which
direct intuition of self is lost. But they turned these states against spiritualism, making them
the spearhead of their attack on the central spiritualist doctrine, that of the unity of self. In
1876, the celebrated case of Félida was written up in the Comptes rendus of the very spiri-
tualist Académie des sciences morales et politiques, and in an article published by E. Azam
in the Revue scientifique under the title, “Periodic Amnesia or Duplication of Life.” Taine
and Ribot perceived in this case a refutation of the unity of self. They believed that it offered
experimental proof of the empirical critique of personal identity advanced by Hume (Hacking,
1995, p. 164).
Certain spiritualist thinkers sought to take up the challenge created by the rise of posi-
tivism in philosophical circles. Paul Janet was one such; and he attempted to integrate the
discoveries of the new science into psychology, and thus into philosophy (Paul Janet, 1888,
Brooks, 1993, 1998). Spiritualist psychology could not, he held, ignore the advances of mental
and neurological medicine. He even accepted them wholeheartedly. Just as Adolphe Garnier
had been a member of the Société Médico-psychologique, Paul Janet was Vice-President of
the Société de psychologie physiologique, which had been founded in 1885, with Charcot as
president of the society. But his insistence on an explanation compatible with spiritualism
was an effort to counter those who sought to found a new psychology. He instantly reacted
to Azam’s account of Félida by interpreting it as “an extension of dream and somnambulism”
affecting only the “external self,” not the internal and “fundamental” self. Janet considered
the “fundamental self” as a kind of transcendental self, self-identical despite the variations
of the outer, empirical self. This form of argument he repeated in very similar terms in his
classic Traité élementaire de philosophie (Paul Janet, 1880, pp. 111 – 112), and in an analysis
of the thesis of his nephew, Pierre Janet (L’Automatisme psychologique), in his Principes de
métaphysique et de psychologie (Paul Janet, 1897).
In Traité élementaire de philosophie, double consciousness and double personality are
presented as a problem. The solution he proposed was adopted as the “official” spiritualist
account and had the effect of making these “facts” thinkable for non-positivist teachers of short
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Paul Janet’s “liberal” spiritualism cleared the way for Bergson, who belonged in the Base of text
same tradition. Despite his opposition to the classical eclectic spiritualism represented by Paul
Janet, Bergson, too, forced himself to integrate the latest scientific discoveries of his age into
his philosophy, often adopting a critical stance. When, in 1889, Pierre Janet proposed a
pathological psychology free of philosophical polemics, he was arguably responding to the
wishes of his uncle Paul. In Paul Janet’s view, medicine had monopolized the subject of the
mental faculties of the mad for far too long. Even in their morbid state, these faculties were
facts of consciousness. He praised Pierre Janet’s thesis in the following terms: “It was there-
fore justifiable to reclaim and reconquer this area for psychology, and thus for philosophy.
This is what Pierre Janet has done” (Paul Janet, 1897, p. 556).

PSYCHOPATHOLOGY AND PHILOSOPHY IN THE WORK OF PIERRE JANET

There was some truth in Paul Janet’s praise, as we shall see. By making the new path-
ological psychology compatible — or, rather, not incompatible — with the earlier philosophy,
Pierre Janet had indeed recovered territory seemingly lost to spiritualism.
Janet’s thesis was well received not only by doctors of medicine and positive psychol-
ogists, but by spiritualists too. (The major exception was Alfred Binet, who, in 1890, pub-
lished a fairly severe critique in the Revue philosophique.7) Why was the reception so
favorable? Ribot’s thesis had not received the same plaudits. For the physicians Janet’s thesis
was an experimental research on double and multiple personalities; it could be read as be-
longing to the evolutionist approach of Spencer and Jackson, and thus as following in the
footsteps of Ribot. But remarkably when Janet cited Spencer, it was to criticize him, and
nowhere does he mention Jackson in his thesis. For the philosophers, Janet’s presentation of
the celebrated notion of subconscious psychological activity kept alive the possibility of a
synthesis between the old and the new psychology.
Janet’s subconscious psychological activity has since been unjustifiably assimilated to a
notion of the unconscious prefiguring Freud’s.8 Terminology is of the essence here. Janet
explicitly sought to create a psychology of degrees of consciousness, and from the outset, he
stated his belief that consciousness of however rudimentary and obscure a kind was a con-
comitant of all actions, however automatic they might seem. And here the main influence
was Maine de Biran. Indeed, Janet often cited Maine de Biran in his work, and in particular
in L’ Automatisme psychologique. He claimed to take his inspiration from the “psychological
theories” of this author and considered him as “a precursor of scientific psychology” (Pierre
Janet, 1889, p. 60) for having described “the affective state” that accompanies certain states
of somnambulism, in which the subject is conscious of sensation without being conscious of
the self.
As a result, Janet sedulously avoided referring to double personalities. Instead he used
expressions such as “disaggregation of the personality” and successive or simultaneous “psy-
chological existences.” He was praised for this by his uncle: “It would be misleading, we

7. Indeed, though Binet sent Janet the customary congratulations on his “important work” they contained veiled
criticism of the lack of reference to Binet’s own work and hypotheses on the subject. Binet reproached Janet explicitly
for putting forward explanations unsupported by fact and expressed his disagreement with the idea that automatic
activity is purely repetitive— an idea central to Janet’s thinking. Binet upheld the theory that creative phenomena
of association exist outside the synthetic activity of the self.
8. At the end of the nineteenth century, Janet and Freud shared the same dissatisfaction in relation to physiological short
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feel, to define as “double personality” the empirical double existence that we have just des- Base of text
cribed” (Paul Janet, 1897, p. 567).
Pierre Janet concluded his chapter on simultaneous psychological existences in strikingly
ambiguous fashion:
We shall, it seems, have to move the boundaries of the metaphysical person still further
back, and consider the very idea of personal unity as an appearance that can undergo
modification. Philosophical systems will undoubtedly contrive to accommodate these
new facts, since they seek to express the reality of things, and one expression of truth
cannot be at variance with another. (Pierre Janet, 1889, p. 323)
He thus issued a twofold plea: for a metaphysics reformed in the light of his experiments,
and for a compromise between the old psychology and the new facts.
The ambiguity of the thesis gave way to a more eclectic formulation in Pierre Janet’s
1896 Manuel du Baccalauréat,9 which went through numerous editions.10 In 1902, a theme
involving psychological automatism was introduced in the baccalauréat, and the Manuel was
reorganized to fit the new syllabus. Pierre’s course book followed in the footsteps of Paul’s,
and might even be described as plagiarizing it. On the subject of “psychology,” Pierre restated,
almost in the same words, many of the arguments of the Traité élémentaire de philosophie.
He gave pride of place to the same authorities: Bossuet, Maine de Biran — described as “one
of the most interesting and ingenious of French psychologists” (Pierre Janet, 1904, p. 441) —
Jouffroy, Garnier, and the Scottish philosophers. Pierre Janet explicated his own pathological
psychology, and emphasized the work of Tarde in his chapter on sympathy and imitation that
was added in 1904. But he failed to cite the most famous philosopher of his time, Henri
Bergson, even when speaking of the duration of states of consciousness and their incom-
mensurability (ibid., p. 10). By contrast, in the almost contemporary survey conducted by
Alfred Binet among one third of French philosophy teachers, certain teachers had cited Berg-
son as a major influence. On this point, then, Pierre Janet had not updated his Manuel, and
gave the impression that spiritualism had not progressed beyond Paul Janet.11
From the outset, he defined psychology as “the science of the facts of consciousness and
of their laws” (ibid., p. 8). Psychological phenomena differed by their nature from physio-
logical phenomena and gave rise to a reflexive knowledge described as “certain” and “infal-
lible,” which formed the basis of “the moral sciences” (ibid., p. 14). This was the starting
point of Pierre Janet’s account of psychology, and it fell squarely within the spiritualist
tradition. However, subjective observation had to be supplemented by objective observation
and experiment, in particular by the natural experiments afforded by “illnesses of the mind”
(ibid., p. 17). In this way the new pathological psychology became compatible with traditional
introspective observation.
Such eclecticism is characteristic of the Manuel. Perhaps the most striking example is
the chapter on La personnalité et l’idée du moi. Pierre Janet stated that “multiple personalities”
did indeed exist, and classed them as pathological phenomena (ibid., p. 179). Accounting for
them did not require one either to adopt the sensualist and organicist critique advanced by
Ribot or to assume that direct intuition of the unity of the self was possible. Pierre Janet put
forward a “constructive theory”:

9. The French baccalauréat is the exam that concludes secondary education. Those who pass it gain the right to
university education.
10. An earlier and less complete edition for the syllabus of the maths option was published in 1894. The 1904
edition, which we have used, includes all the 1896 additions, but reorganized them to fit the new syllabus. short
11. Bergson made his first appearance in the reworked 1925 edition of the Manuel, of which more later. standard
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The unity and identity of the personality, far from being granted from the first moment Base of text
of life as intuitions, far from being the mechanical result of sensation itself, must be
gradually acquired and constructed. The unity of the personality is the ideal and endpoint
of our efforts. (ibid., p. 181)

Thus, for Pierre Janet, the sensualists were right about the inferior and primitive states,
and the spiritualists were right about superior and evolved states. Nevertheless, in
L’Automatisme psychologique, the evolutionism underlying this argument remained implicit.
Pierre Janet abandoned the immediate intuition of self so dear to Paul Janet but contrived to
save the unity of self under the heading of “mental synthesis.” He thus made the fact of
personality the terminus ad quem of a process of evolution identified as progress toward an
ideal.
Evidently, a course book is not the place to set out one’s own notions, and Pierre Janet
scrupulously confined himself to the subjects specified by the syllabus of the baccalauréat.
A similar kind of conciliatory eclecticism characterized other course books of the period,
such as Elie Rabier’s classical Leçons de philosophie (1884). Bergson’s classes were similar.
What is significant for our purposes is that, after his two theses had conferred on him the
status of a rising star in French scientific psychology, Pierre Janet still felt the need to follow
in his uncle’s footsteps and publicly assume the identity of a philosophy teacher. Probably
he wanted to make some money from a much-used and much-revised course of philosophy.
But comparison with Ribot makes it clear that Janet found no contradiction between the status
of philosophy teacher and that of scientific psychologist. Whereas Bergson refused to publish
his lessons, Janet made no distinction between teaching and writing. Indeed, publication of
his courses accounts for the majority of his works.
In 1925, he entirely reworked his long-serving Manuel to adapt it to the new syllabus
of 1923. On the subject of aesthetics, he enlisted the collaboration of Charles Lalo. For
experimental psychology, more significantly, he chose Henri Piéron, professor of the Collège
de France and director of the Laboratoire de Psychologie of the Sorbonne. For more than
fifty years, Piéron masterminded the institutionalization of experimental and applied psy-
chology in France.12 The new course book comprised two juxtaposed parts, which could be
sold as separate fascicules: Eléments de psychologie expérimentale by Henri Piéron (pp. 1 –
108) and Eléments de psychologie pathologique by Pierre Janet (pp. 109 – 160). Janet thus
gave physical form to a divide between two orientations in French psychology. The divide
has lasted till the present day.
Janet’s contribution was an evolutionist psychology of la conduite involving a hierar-
chical ordering of tendencies. Yet it remained, in essence, a development of the psychology
that he had initiated in 1889. Chapter IV, which deals with “illnesses of the personality,”
summarizes and explicates most of the themes of L’Automatisme psychologique. Many com-
mentators maintain that Pierre Janet abandoned the psychology of consciousness in the second
part of his work, in favor of a conception closely related to American behaviorism. This is
not so. In 1938, in a résumé of his system written for an encyclopedia, he reaffirmed that the
complex reality of human conduct must not be confused with purely animal behavior. He
intended to found a psychology that “adds . . . the study of consciousness and all the su-
perior phenomena to behavioral psychology” (Pierre Janet, 1938, p. 11). When dealing with
a human being capable of speech, he believed one had to envisage psychological evolution
as originating in less conscious inferior actions to result in fully conscious superior ones. In

12. In the biographical index of the 1925 manual, the references to Jouffroy, Garnier, and Paul Janet are unchanged, short
but there are additional entries under Bergson, Freud, Pierre Janet, Henri Piéron, and Jean Piaget. standard
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his psycho-philosophy of action, Janet had widened and reoriented the spiritualism of his Base of text
youth, but he had not abandoned it.

CONCLUSION
The traditional historical account of the “discovery of the unconscious” perceives the
work of Pierre Janet as highly innovative. This impression has been reinforced by the revival
in the United States of the theme of dissociative problems. But to perceive Janet in this way
is to dissociate him from his own time and map present-day concerns onto him. In this study,
we have attempted to restore the context that ensured the success of a young philosophy
teacher, Pierre Janet, and almost immediately bestowed classic status on his writings. In our
view, Pierre Janet attempted to construe a psychology of consciousness in a way compatible
with what Paul Janet called the “very solid doctrine of the unity of consciousness, without
which everything disintegrates into universal illusion” (Paul Janet, 1897, p. 570; Carroy &
Plas, in press).
Our point of view is parallel to that expressed in 1897, in a letter from Pierre Janet to
Xavier Léon (see Appendix) and, later, in a boutade reported by the psychiatrist Eugène
Minkowski. In 1939, Minkowski noted that Pierre Janet had defined himself as an “uneasy
spiritualist.” Janet himself gave publicly some credibility to his point of view in 1942, in his
preface to Jean Delay’s Les Dissolutions de la mémoire. Delay’s book was a neo-Jacksonian
treatise that drew on the evolutionism set out by Janet in his courses at the Collège de France.
In his preface, Pierre Janet noted nostalgically (and perhaps a little mischievously) that he
accepted the interpretations of his own work by the Catholic philosopher Jean Paulus (1941).
And Paulus had sought the derivation of Janet’s youthful notions, over and beyond Spencer
and Jackson, in the old French psychology of Jouffroy and Baillarger.
Our starting point was a French scientific orthodoxy that sees in the break with philos-
ophy the sine qua non for the foundation of French scientific psychology. After our exami-
nation of the exemplary case of Pierre Janet, this is no longer tenable. It is, perhaps, a
specifically French foundation myth, intended to hide the ambivalent relations between psy-
chology and the philosophical roots of the discipline.

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APPENDIX
A letter from Pierre Janet to Xavier Léon (27-9-1897)
(Bibliothèque Victor Cousin, Sorbonne, Fonds Xavier Léon, MS 362).

The Revue de métaphysique et de morale was founded in 1893 by Xavier Léon to compete
in some way with the Revue philosophique, founded by Théodule Ribot in 1876 (Thirard,
1976). On the other hand, the Revue de métaphysique et de morale took a “conciliatory line,”
publishing articles by both Bergson and Durkeim for example (Merllié, 1993, p. 68). Pierre
Janet had previously published many of his early articles in the Revue philosophique. Xavier
Léon wanted him to contribute to his review, but it was only after an interval of about forty
years that Janet eventually published in Léon’s Revue some “special studies” on belief and
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240 JACQUELINE CARROY AND RÉGINE PLAS Base of RH
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Dear Sir, Base of text
You are right not to consider me as if I were a foreigner. I have never lost all of an old
youthful passion for metaphysics and I am still interested in your studies. Moreover, are there
any two things more close, more dependent upon each other than metaphysics and psychol-
ogy? Therefore I am far from refusing you my collaboration for the Revue de métaphysique
et de morale. Ribot will not be put out by this, I am sure. There is but one difficulty, that is
that I am short of time for doing all that we want. I am having published, at the moment, two
large volumes on the idées fixes; I shall be going back to the Lycée Condorcet, and I have
quite a lot of patients to consider and, if possible, cure, at the hospital and privately. You can
judge for yourself whether I have the calm concentration needed for your study. If, one day,
I can find a moment’s leisure time, I will give some thought to your request and I will try to
pick out from my own rather special studies what may interest metaphysicians and moral
philosophers.
Therefore with this letter, I am sending my latest articles which may interest you one
day, perhaps, if you have the courage to read them through.
Yours respectfully.
Pierre Janet.

Monsieur,
Vous avez raison en ne me considérant pas comme un étranger. J’ai toujours conservé
quelques restes d’une vieille passion de jeunesse pour la métaphysique et je m’intéresse
toujours à vos études. D’ailleurs, est-il deux choses plus rapprochés, plus indispensables l’une
à l’autre que la métaphysique et la psychologie? Aussi je suis loin de vous refuser ma col-
laboration à la Revue de métaphysique et de morale. M. Ribot n’en sera pas fâché, j’en suis
sûr. Il n’y a qu’une difficulté, c’est que le temps manque pour faire tout ce que l’on désire.
Je publie en ce moment deux gros volumes sur les idées fixes, je vais retourner au lycée
Condorcet et j’ai pas mal de malades à étudier et à guérir si possible, à l’hôpital et en ville.
Jugez si j’ai le calme recueillement nécessaire pour vos études. Si un jour je trouve un instant
de liberté, je me rappellerai votre demande et je chercherai à tirer de mes études un peu
spéciales ce qui peut intéresser les métaphysiciens et les moralistes.
Permettez-moi de vous envoyer ci-joint quelques-uns de mes derniers articles qui pour-
ront vous intéresser un jour peut-être si vous avez le courage de les parcourir.
Croyez à l’assurance de mes meilleurs sentiments.
Pierre Janet

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