International Journal on Criminology Volume 7, Number 1, Winter 2019/2020 | Page 33

International Journal on Criminology
tient whose hands were also completely anesthetic always knew,
simply by touch and without a mirror, whether her hair was arranged
as she liked it. 26
It is precisely that which is absolutely not felt (in the complex sense of conscious
intuition, the sensation being a phenomenon dominated by secondary acts,
which in this case are excluded) that Janet sees as the strictly unconscious act. 27
He therefore sees this as the most extreme pathological point of our subconscious,
rather than the subconscious itself.
Unconscious acts detach themselves, duplicate themselves, and may even
oppose the present, but the conscious/subconscious pair emerges when it is a
matter of reproducing an action stored earlier (putting on earrings or hairpins or
checking one’s hair, as in the examples from Janet cited above) that expresses behaviors
that have been crystallized in mechanisms and automatisms—i.e. in solutions
or syntheses of previous actions that refuse the resulting action when faced
with a new situation. This new situation can be just as much a trauma, what Janet
calls a shock-emotion, as a new approach. 28 This leads to the narrowing of what
is visible (although the brain may still continuously imprint images of it, but ones
that consciousness obscures), 29 and the subject instead returns over and over to the
known, or to the most personal automatism:
Instead of being complete and governing all conscious thought,
psychological automatism can be partial, governing a small group
of phenomena distinct from others, isolated from the individual’s
total consciousness, which continues to develop on its own account
in another direction. 30
This work by Janet, L’automatisme psychologique, was published in 1889.
* * *
26 Janet, Conférences à la Salpêtrière, 21–22.
27 Janet, L’automatisme psychologique, part 2, chapter 1, “Les actes subconscients,” I, “Les catalepsies
partielles,” 264–65: “By ‘unconscious act,’ we understand an act that has all the characteristics of a
psychological fact with the exception of one: the person who carries it out is always unaware of it
even at the very moment that they carry it out.”
28 Janet, De l’angoisse à l’extase, tome 2, 329.
29 “Images were projected at high speed to the students, showing faces distorted in fear. [Due to the
speed,] the participants were not able to actually see the images. But the researchers—who were
observing their brains at the same time using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI)—saw the corresponding
part of the fear center light up” (“La science rejoint Freud,” Le Point, April 20, 2006).
30 Janet, L’automatisme psychologique, 264–65.
28