Pierre Janet and the breakdown of adaptation in psychological trauma

Abstract

In this reappraisal of the work of Pierre Janet at the centenary of the publication of L’automatisme psy-chologique, the authors review his investigations into the mental processes that transform traumatic experi-ences into psychopathology. Janet was the first to systematically study dissociation as the crucial psycho-logical process with which the organism reacts to over-whelming experiences and show that traumatic mem-ones may be expressed as sensory perceptions, affect states, and behavioral reenactments. Janet provided a broad framework that unifies into a larger perspective the various approaches to psychological functioning which have developed along independent lines in this century. Today his integrated approach may help clar-ify the interrelationships among such diverse topics as memory processes, state-dependent learning, dissocia-tive reactions, and posttraumatic psychopathology. (Am J Psychiatry 1989; 146:1S30-1S40) All the famous moralists of olden days drew attention to the way in which certain happenings would leave indelible and distressing memories-memories to which the sufferer was continually returning, and by which he was tormented by day and by night.-Janet (1, p. 589)O ne hundred years ago, in 1889, Pierre Janet (1859-1947) published L’automatisme psycho-logique (2), his first book to explore the psychologica