Abstract
PIEBRE JANET, who died in Paris on February 24 at the age of eighty-seven, played a notable part in the development of clinical psychology. He took a degree in philosophy in 1882, and some of his best work was done before taking his degree in medicine eleven years later. He held various academic posts before becoming a professor at the Sorbonne, and was for a time in charge of the psychological laboratory attached to the Salpetriere Clinic. It is not easy to trace his personal relationship with Charcot at that period, and their fundamental attitudes were very different. Thus, in his account of the controversy (c. 1886) when Bernheim showed that Charcot's phenomena of hysteria and hypnotism were artefacts, “the results of unskilled suggestion and involuntary training”, he wrote (“Principles of Psychotherapy”, trans., London, 1925 ; p. 30): “The victory of the animists was not well received, at least in the scientific world. They acknowledged it but deplored it. The doctrine of Charcot that it defeated was clear, definite, and easy to study ; it seemed to bring animal magnetism within the limits of physiology, and that looked like scientific progress.”
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CULPIN, M. Prof. Pierre Janet. Nature 159, 495–496 (1947). https://doi.org/10.1038/159495a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/159495a0