International Journal on Criminology Volume 7, Number 1, Winter 2019/2020 | Page 36

Criminology Comes Back to Pierre Janet
Janet could, for instance, write the following about Breuer and Freud in
1913 (I emphasize some significant words):
these authors showed using very well chosen examples that certain
disorders were the consequence of “traumatic memories”; their observations,
I remarked with pleasure, were entirely analogous to
my own. At the very most, these authors had changed a few words
in the psychological descriptions they gave: what I called “psychological
analysis,” they called “psychoanalysis”; what they called
“complexus,” I had called the “psychological system,” thereby referring
to the set of psychological phenomena and movements—
either of the members or of the viscera—that remained connected
and which constituted the traumatic memory; and they gave the
name “catharsis” to what I had labeled a dissociation of idées fixes
or moral disinfection. 46
In the same account, which was widely criticized, Janet also recognized
Freud’s merits on certain topics—for example, on repression, 47 or later, in 1926, on
the link between anxiety and “sexual acts that are halted before consummation.” 48
Falsehoods about Janet’s Work
Janet sought “peer-to-peer” discussion rather than controversy—so why so
much hatred for Janet, not just on the part of Freud but even now, several
decades later, from those like Élisabeth Roudinesco (a historian, rather than a
psychologist or doctor by training)? 49
In Roudinesco’s discussion of Janet, in Histoire de la psychanalyse en France,
she is interested only in Janet’s envy and jealousy of Freud, which she sees as the
main cause of his criticisms of psychoanalysis. Her view is based on work that is,
if not wrong, then at least obsolete. A single example demonstrates this. Roudinesco
speaks of a “misunderstanding present since Charcot” in describing correspondence
between Jung and Freud, particularly regarding the general refusal in
France, and by Janet in particular, to place sexual repression at the heart of analysis.
50 So, Freud apparently remarked to Jung that
46 Janet, La psychanalyse de Freud, 58.
47 Ibid., 75.
48 Janet, De l’angoisse à l’extase, tome 2, 255.
49 This institutional reminder seems necessary when we read Roudinesco’s treatment of Onfray.
Their disagreement did not justify such an argument from authority: http://bibliobs.nouvelobs.com/20100416/18956/roudinesco-deboulonne-onfray.
Furthermore, while Onfray refused
to debate with Roudinesco (http://www.mediapart.fr/club/edition/les-invites-de-mediapart/article/180410/reponse-delisabeth-roudinesco-la-reponse-de-mic).
I am very happy to offer a number
of clarifications on these questions.
50 Élisabeth Roudinesco, Histoire de la psychanalyse en France (Paris: Fayard, 1994), tome 1, 224.
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