The Dynamic Psychology of Mental Energy: Rediscovering Pierre Janet’s Trauma Theory

Recent scholarly attention to the affinity of neuroscience and Pierre Janet’s psychology has led to his reassessment as a precursor of neuroscientific trauma studies. This essay examines Janet’s trauma theory in the context of this reappraisal of his psychology in the age of neuroscience. Janet’s resurgence is primarily due to the fact that he constructed his psychological system on his keen observations of the inseparable connection and dynamic interaction between the mind and the body. Janet’s observation of hysterical patients’ unconscious automatic activities enables an understanding of human activity as a psychological phenomenon, leading him to the discovery of the subconscious which is dissociated from the normal consciousness and holds fixed ideas that cause symptoms of involuntary movement and paralysis. Dissociation results from the narrowing of consciousness and its failure to integrate perceptions. Traumatic events, together with heredity factors, induce the retraction of consciousness, precipitating the mind’s lower function such as psychological automatism, and impairing its higher function of integration. Janet’s theory of psychological healing aims to reintegrate dissociated consciousness by finding and liquidating fixed ideas through suggestion, but it also substitutes those ideas for positive re-conceptualization of traumatic events and even dismantling and excising traumatic memories. Unable to assimilate traumatic events into the narrative of his life history, the patient repeatedly and unwittingly re-enacts them. Accordingly, healing involves “presentification” which empowers the patient to narrate traumatic events as past accidents from the vantage point of the present. Adaptation is accomplished by economically assessing the level of patient’s mental energy, which has been depleted by trauma, and promoting diverse methods to prevent further exhaustion and reinvest psychological “force” into higher “tendencies” of the mind. Janet also proposes the therapist’s “moral guidance” that balances the therapist’s active intervention and his support of the patient’s psychological independence, which reminds neuroscientific traumatologists of the importance of the subject’s agency and human interaction in the healing process.