International Journal on Criminology Volume 7, Number 1, Winter 2019/2020 | Page 31

Janet adds:
International Journal on Criminology
I believe there is a whole psychological study to be written—and a
very interesting one—on this internal, continual reverie that plays
a considerable part in many people’s lives. We could study the content
of these reveries, and would sometimes observe interesting
psychological work being carried out within us without our knowledge.
It is thanks to such subconscious work that we find problems
resolved that, a short time ago, we did not understand. This very
often happens. 13
But we must not confuse these impulses or tendencies with urges, which
express the disintegration or hysterical dimension (i.e. the narrowing) of the consciousness,
leading ultimately to a splitting of the personality and those things that
result from it, oscillating between apathy and active agitation (with no purpose
beyond ardor and passion). 14 Tendencies are manifested openly, without any further
synthesis.
It is this stage, one of gradual implosion, that Janet calls the unconscious
proper. This is to be understood literally: whereas, in the subconscious, impulses
are constantly agitated insofar as they are possible (although constrained to
a greater or lesser degree by the synthesis of the consciousness, which leads to
slips, moments of clumsiness, increases or decreases in tension and mood), the
unconscious requires precisely that the subject no longer has any awareness at all
that they are speaking out loud incessantly, or that their limbs are moving, ranging
from tics to constant agitation.
Janet observes, for example, an increase in silence, 15 a kind of narrowing
of the mind, 16 coupled with a feeling of tiredness and a distrust of oneself and
the world. As a condition for exerting effort, the “feeling of freedom and the very
feeling of existence” cannot be “questioned at the moment of motor effort.” Janet
emphasizes this point by citing these remarks made by Maine de Biran. 17 This may
not be self-evident, and may lead to a refusal to act, to fatigue of being oneself, 18
to melancholy, and to their extremes—which includes psychasthenia, “ordinarily
characterized by obsessions, phobias, and impulses that are accompanied by consciousness
but which, in certain cases, lead to genuine and serious delusions.” 19
13 Pierre Janet, Névroses et idées fixes (1898) (Paris: Société Pierre Janet, 1990), 393.
14 Janet, De l’angoisse à l’extase, tome 2, 92.
15 Ibid., 199.
16 Ibid., 198.
17 Ibid., 111.
18 Alain Ehrenberg, The Weariness of the Self: Diagnosing the History of Depression in the Contemporary
Age (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010). See Lucien Oulahbib, “Et si Janet
était plus actuel que Freud?,” PSN: Psychiatrie-Sciences Humaines-Neurosciences 1, no. 7 (February
2009): 1–14.
19 Janet, De l’angoisse à l’extase, tome 1, 277.
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