Catalepsy, Memory, and Suggestion in Psychological Automatism: Total Automatism

by Pierre Janet, Giuseppe Craparo (Contributor), Onno van der Hart (Contributor)

"Pierre Janet's De l'Automatisme Psychologique, originally published in 1889, is one of the earliest and most important books written on the study of trauma and dissociation. Here it is made available in English for the first time, with a new foreword by Giuseppe Craparo and Onno van der Hart. This seminal work will be of great interest to researchers and students of psychoanalysis, philosophy and modernism, as well as psychotherapists and psychoanalysts working with clients who have experienced trauma. It is accompanied by Subconscious Acts, Anesthesias and Psychological Disaggregation in Psychological Automatism: Partial Automatism"--

Unknown Binding

Published October 1, 2021

About the author

Pierre Marie Félix Janet was a pioneering French psychologist, philosopher, and psychotherapist in the field of dissociation and traumatic memory. He is ranked alongside William James and Wilhelm Wundt as one of the founding fathers of psychology.

Janet was one of the first people to allege a connection between events in a subject's past life and his or her present-day trauma, and coined the words "dissociation" and "subconscious". His study of the "magnetic passion" or "rapport" between the patient and the hypnotist anticipated later accounts of the transference phenomenon.

The 20th century saw Janet developing a grand model of the mind in terms of levels of energy, efficiency and social competence, which he set out in publications including Obsessions and Psychasthenia (1903) and From Anguish to Ecstasy (1926), among others. In its concern for the construction of the personality in social terms, this model has been compared to the social behaviorism of George Herbert Mead something which explains Lacan's early praise of "Janet, who demonstrated so admirably the signification of feelings of persecution as phenomenological moments in social behavior".