International Journal on Criminology Volume 7, Number 1, Winter 2019/2020 | Page 37

International Journal on Criminology
Janet has a fine intellect, but he set off without sexuality and now
he can’t get any further—and we know that, in France, there’s no
turning back.
Note that the use of the term “misunderstanding” attached to Charcot’s
name is apparently ambiguous, since it suggests that Charcot fundamentally misunderstood
Freud. But that was not the case: Charcot simply did not agree with
the causal unilaterality Freud defended, as we have seen. And it is clear that Janet
was not unfamiliar with questions of a sexual nature. For example:
An agitated person cannot stay put, but paces backs and forth in
his room, or else goes out and walks forward indefinitely: if I hadn’t
gone out I would have broken everything; I had to walk a lot, or else
I had to masturbate to calm myself down .... 51
Freud was admittedly more successful than Janet, especially with the vogue
for surrealism and automatic writing, and then for Freudo-Marxism, and then for
personal improvement—although today his star has dimmed considerably, something
that has resulted far more from the insights of cognitive, motivational, and
differential psychology, 52 than from the polemics fueled by Le Livre noir de la psychanalyse
53 or, more recently, by Michel Onfray’s book. 54
Janet’s Consideration of Powerlessness to Act as Trauma
For Janet, this unicausal system does not correspond to his own object of
study, because such repression is not the only thing that matters. Rather,
what matters is the even deeper thing it acts as a symptom of: powerlessness
to act. This leads people, for instance, to use sex, or food (anorexia, bulimia), abulia,
irascibility, and partial or hemiplegic paralysis as compensating solutions, as
diversions. Excesses of these express a subconscious conflict. The final stage of this
conflict is its consignment to the unconscious—i.e. its dissociation.
Thus, instead of acting to achieve this goal, which would require focusing on
the feeling of effort, 55 the subject instead directs his or her excess or misused energy
toward a distraction (such as food) resulting in a crisis that may turn into flight,
into an idée fixe, into a neurosis in Janet’s sense of the term. In other words, it may
51 Janet, De l’angoisse à l’extase, tome 2, 326.
52 For instance, the work of Joseph Nuttin and Maurice Reuchlin.
53 Catherine Meyer et al. Le livre noir de la psychanalyse: Vivre, penser et aller mieux sans Freud
(Paris: Arènes, 2005).
54 Michel Onfray, Le crépuscule d’une idole (Paris: Grasset, 2010).
55 For Janet, action is regulated by four principal feelings (which are to be distinguished from the
emotions, which are their scansion): effort, joy, sadness, and fatigue. See Janet, De l’angoisse à l’extase,
tome 2, 326.
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