Pierre Janet

Pierre Marie Felix Janet (1859 to 1947) was a pioneering French psychologist, physician, philosopher and psychotherapist who worked on dissociation and traumatic memory. He studied under Jean-Martin Charcot at the Salpetriere Hospital in Paris, presented his philosophy thesis in 1889 and a medical thesis on the mental state of hysterics in 1892, and became lecturer at the Sorbonne in 1898. In 1901 he founded the French Psychological Society and in 1902 took the chair of experimental and comparative psychology at the College de France, which he held until 1936. He coined the words dissociation and subconscious, proposed a developmental hierarchy of nine tendencies of the mind, and introduced the idea of the fixed idea. His relationship with Sigmund Freud was contested: Janet argued that many psychoanalytic terms renamed older concepts, while Carl Jung and Alfred Adler acknowledged debts to his work. He gave 15 lectures at Harvard Medical School in 1906.