Catalepsy, Memory and Suggestion in Psychological Automatism: Total Automatism

by Pierre Janet, Adam Crabtree (Translator), Sarah Osei-Bonsu (Translator)

Pierre Janet’s 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 two volumes, in English for the first time, with a new preface by Giuseppe Craparo and Onno van der Hart. Catalepsy, Memory, and Suggestion in Psychological Automatism , the first volume, examines three aspects of trauma and dissociation. Janet first explores catalepsy and analogous states, including comparing catalepsy to somnambulism, then discusses somnambulism, memory, and forgetting. Finally, Janet considers suggestion, amnesia, and distraction, as well as considering characteristics of suggestible individuals. Janet’s work is an unsurpassed experimental study of human actions in their simplest and most rudimentary forms, and a fundamental contribution to our understanding of trauma-related dissociation. 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 Partial Automatism.

170 pages, Paperback

Published November 5, 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".