Pierre Janet’s Evolutionism : A Guideline For Assessment and Reformulation
I. Saillot, PhD
Institut Pierre Janet
Paris, France
Corresponding Address:
I. Saillot, PhD.
Institut Pierre Janet
23 rue de La Rochefoucauld
75009 Paris, France
tél : + 33 (0)6 61 78 76 04
fax : + 33 (0)1 42 81 11 17
E-mail: institut@pierre-janet.com
Abstract
Pierre Janet’s views on evolution pertain to a historical model with many facets bearing specific roles in his
psychology grounding. A detailed investigation of such conceptual elementary components will be attempted here,
from quotations from his works will help finding a definition fitting his views, showing that Pierre Janet adopted the
prevalent views around 1900. This diagnostic of Pierre Janet’s evolutionism will be compared to some critiques that
have been made to theories close to his own, rooted in this nineteenth century biology also. Since Pierre Janet
expressed his evolutionary system, evolutionary biology underwent major paradigmatic changes : the question of
how the components of Pierre Janet’s psychology grounding suffered from these biological research advances will
be addressed.
Pierre Janet’s evolutionism lies in his psychology more than in his psychiatry
Pierre Janet’s evolutionism has been attested by historians (Ellenberger, 1970; Prévost, 1973a/73b; Braunstein, J.-F.
& Pewzner, E, 1999), who generally agree that he became evolutionist around the 1920s. The situation seems in fact
more complex, because chronology is not the only parameter, but also his kinds of writings. Pierre Janet’s work can
be divided into four parts : research articles (1885 – 1946), Lessons at The College de France (1901 – 1934), books
(1889 – 1932) and other writings that don’t enter the three first ones, such as occasional discourses or book reviews.
As for the three first ones, these works display different uses of evolutionary concepts, related to their proportion of
psychology vs. psychiatry. I will call Pierre Janet’s « psychiatry » this part of his work dealing with diagnosis and
treatment of the neuroses, while Pierre Janet’s “psychology” will be the part of his work addressing the
psychological interpretation of his psychiatry, and all of his works focused on conducts, ideas, beliefs, feelings and
will, as theoretical main issues.
Pierre Janet’s psychiatry has never been strongly rooted in evolutionism, it’s his psychology that used an
evolutionary grounding. From his first articles on hysteria to his last ones, Pierre Janet’s diagnosis and treatment
methods scarcely relied on evolutionary concepts. Till 1926, all of his books made an important room to psychiatric
concerns : hence, till 1926 none of them were profoundly dependant on evolutionary biology, while about 70% of
his research articles dealt with medical issues, and addressed evolution no more than his books.
In 1926, with « De l'angoisse à l'extase. Études sur les croyances et les sentiments », (Janet, 1926-28), Pierre Janet’s
books became less psychiatric, and more focused on psychology. These works have been rooted in evolutionary
biology since the beginning. His Lessons at The College de France, being psychological by definition of his Chair,
started to be overtly evolutionary earlier. As soon as in 1909, he was already writing « Les tendances sont des
sytèmes de faits physiologiques et psychologiques associés entre eux au cours de l’évolution… » (Janet, 1909a).
After 1926, 50% of Pierre Janet’s research articles being psychological, depended on evolutionary issues too.
We assume that Pierre Janet’s psychiatry didn’t involve much biology because it was grounded in his psychology.
There are certainly advanced epistemological studies about the nature of the « grounding » relationship between two
theories, and it would be most relevant to go into this more in depth. But here, let’s chose a very simple definition,
stating that when a field is grounding by another field, they’re linked by a law of causality, the first one
« explaining » the second one. According to this, within Pierre Janet’s works, the laws of psychology explain the
psychiatric facts, in other words, psychiatry is applied psychology. Both field can be regarded autonomous
nevertheless: breaking the causality bond between them renders psychology theoretical, and psychiatry descriptive.
Stating that Pierre Janet’s psychology is grounded in evolutionary biology lead to the same pattern. With its
causality inside biology, Pierre Janet’s psychology is applied biology. Without this causality bond, Pierre Janet’s
psychology is descriptive, and autonomous.
Pierre Janet often stated that his works were descriptive, arguing that the psychological « sciences » were not
advanced enough to produce explanations, but only descriptions. Those statements account for his strong
involvement in clinical psychology (i.e. descriptions of the individual cases), and lead Claude Prévost to compare
Pierre Janet’s psychology with Husserl’s phenomenology. However, it seems that Pierre Janet has not always
followed pure descriptive intentions. In fact, he interpreted his clinical cases, often overtly claiming to do so. This
accounts for his psychiatry being grounded in psychology. But there’s more, he even interpreted his own
psychological results (themselves interpretations of his psychiatric cases), and there lies the grounding of his
psychology into evolutionary biology.
Because epistemologically this grounding relationship can be broken in principle, Pierre Janet’s psychology can be
said autonomous, and surely is. Nevertheless, the scope of this article is not to show how Pierre Janet’s psychology
is autonomous (this would require an entire study), but on the contrary to show the limits of its autonomy. These
limits can be investigated simply, as a preliminary study, by tracking a few concepts clearly rising at the borderline :
evolution, development, adaptation, progress, stages and a few others that Pierre Janet’s quotations will provide. It
will be claimed here that these concepts don’t belong to Pierre Janet’s psychology main results, hence rescuing his
psychology autonomy and validity, but are nevertheless the ones modern Janetian research must be particularly
cautious about.
Pierre Janet’s evolutionary biology
Because Pierre Janet gave much importance to the evolutionary grounding of his psychology, and because he is
mostly remembered and quoted, paradoxically, as a evolutionist alienist, it is certainly an important issue to
understand what he meant by this concept of « evolution ».
Unfortunately, he doesn’t give an accurate definition of what he thought about. Even when he addresses the issue
directly, for instance in a chapter dedicated to « L’Evolution » in « L’Évolution de la mémoire et de la notion du
temps » (Janet, 1928b), as well as in a related article (Janet, 1928a), it seems that he takes for granted that the
audience will understand the meaning, and will merely need his point of view and examples. Nevertheless, he wrote
very much about evolution, and some quotations from his work will make it possible to build a pattern fitting his
views about what evolution is, how it works, and what are its consequences, summarized here in 6 points.
1 – Evolution is double sided. On one hand it’s a gradual transformation of the individual during its daily life, on the
other hand, it is the transformation of its « race », which takes place over longer periods.
 « Chaque homme évolue continuellement de deux manières : en premier lieu il doit accomplir à chaque
instant de sa vie et plus fortement à certaines périodes un développement individuel qui, de la naissance à la
mort, transforme incessamment son activité, en second lieu il participe sans cesse à l’évolution de la race
qui se transforme plus rapidement qu’on ne croit au milieu des incessantes modifications du milieu social ».
(Janet, 1909b).
 « (l’évolution est) ce fait qu’un être vivant se transforme continuellement pour s’adapter à des circonstances
nouvelles […] ». (Janet, 1909b).
 « Une certaine partie de toutes les fonctions humaines, la partie la plus élevée, est-elle toujours en voie de
transformation ». (Janet, 1909b).
2 – Conducts evolve and develop to adapt ever better to circumstances : they are useful. As a consequence,
evolution goes towards perfection.
 « Les théories périphériques [des sentiments] ne tiennent pas compte du point de vue biologique, elles ne
cherchent pas la raison d'être de cet état d'émotion qui s'est développé d'une manière générale chez tous les
êtres vivants et qui n'a subsisté au cours de l'évolution que parce qu'il avait une utilité, une fonction à
remplir ». (Janet, 1926-28).
 « Les divers sentiments que nous considérions comme des régulations de l'action avaient toujours une
utilité… ». (Janet, 1926-28).
 « L'évolutionnisme, c'est tout simplement l'usage de la notion de progrès et d'invention ». (Janet, 1928b).
3 – Evolution obeys Haeckel’s law : it is recapitulated by the embryo (organic) development.
 « Les phénomènes de la volonté, ou du moins une partie d’entre eux, la perception de la réalité changeante,
la formation des croyances ne sont comparables qu’à des phénomènes de développement organique ».
(Janet, 1909).
 « C'est pourquoi la psychologie des conduites doit se présenter en grande partie comme une psychologie
génétique, suivant l'expression de J. M. Baldwin ». (Janet, 1926-28).
4 – Anciant functions already have dedicated organs. But progresses and inventions from the individuals are
currently creating future organs, by direct transmission of daily adaptations to the descendance.
 « Il y a aussi dans toute fonction des parties supérieures consistant dans l’adaptation de cette fonction à des
circonstances plus récentes, beaucoup moins habituelles, qui sont représentées par des organes beaucoup
moins différentiés ». (Janet, 1909).
 « L’anatomie, en effet, étudie surtout et nécessairement les organes anciens, bien délimités, identiques chez
tous les hommes, en un mot, les organes des fonctions parvenues à l’état stable ; elle ne peut pas connaître
les organes futurs, ceux qui n’existent encore qu’en germe, en formation ». (Janet, 1909).
5 – Evolution and its embryologic analogy, passes through a series of stages or levels of perfection. Inferior levels of
this progression can be observed today in children, primitives, apes, and neurotic people.

« … chez les individus de divers niveaux, les animaux, les enfants, les primitifs et surtout chez les
malades… ». (Janet, 1926-28).

« les enfants et les malades », « l'enfant et (de) l'idiot ». (Janet, 1889).

« les primitifs ou les malades en dépression n'ont aucunement ces notions ». (Janet, 1926-28).

« A côté et peut-être déjà un peu au-dessus du singe nous voyons le petit enfant que l'on commence à
étudier aujourd'hui beaucoup ». (Janet, 1935).

« Les malades dont je m'occupe le plus souvent ne peuvent guère, en ce moment, nous être utiles, car,
malgré leurs troubles, ils restent, en général, beaucoup trop supérieurs aux chimpanzés » (Janet, 1935).

« chez les primitifs et chez les enfants », « chez le primitif et chez l'enfant » (Janet, 1935).
6 – Today’s remaining inferior levels can be explained by arrests or regressions of development (or evolution).
 « le caractère essentiel de l'émotion est une régression brutale vers les conduites inférieures ». (Janet, 192628).
 « N'est-il pas naturel qu'à une certaine époque les êtres en voie de perfectionnement, mais incapables
d'utiliser encore d'une manière constante les procédés perfectionnés soient revenus instinctivement à ces
actes primitifs ? » (Janet, 1926-28).
 « …la régression des actes qui se manifeste dans l'émotion… » (Janet, 1926-28).
 « Tous ces malades semblent arrêtés dans l'évolution de la vie […] ». (Janet, 1923).
 « …les malades qui nous présentent par les arrêts de développement et les régressions toutes les formes et
tous les degrés de ces évolutions psychologiques ». (Janet, 1926-28).
Pierre Janet holds his evolutionary views from the historical context of research at his time…
Although Pierre Janet doesn’t define the evolution concept, he uses it abundantly. The reason why is that at his time,
most of the scholars and their audience not only all understood it, but also in the same meaning. Evolutionism was
in fact a most common, popular and fertile means of analysis within many different research fields, far beyond its
biological remote origins (Gould, 1974, 1977, 2000; Burian, 2000; Gayon & Burian, 2004). Like most of his masters
and colleagues, Pierre Janet adopted this prevalent view, which encountered very few oppositions at that time.
Though Pierre Janet was born in 1859, the very year Darwin published his « Origin of Species » (Darwin, 1859), the
evolutionary pattern he adopted is a Lamarckian one. Lamarck established two main laws of evolution. The first one
is that use or disuse of an organ causes it to enlarge or shrink, because an alteration of the environment causes an
alteration of the behavior also. The second law is that all such changes are heritable. The result of these laws is the
continuous and gradual change of organisms, as they become more adapted to their environments (Gould, 1977/79).
Lamarckian laws of evolution account for point 1 of Pierre Janet’s evolutionary views, according to which evolution
is a gradual transformation of the individual during its daily life which commands the transformation of its « race »
(species) over longer periods. They also account, though less directly, for point 4, according to which inventions of
the individuals are currently creating future organs.
Now, we’ve stated that Pierre Janet adopted only the most common evolutionary views in his time. But Darwin had
published in 1859, i.e. 51 years before Pierre Janet started to ground his psychology on evolutionism. How is it that
the most famous evolutionary biology opinions around 1910 were still Lamarckian and not Darwinian ? For sure
complex historical studies would be needed to explain this in detail, and we cannot attempt such an endeavour here.
But to understand Pierre Janet’s point of view, it may be sufficient to recall the following elements.
Herbert Spencer as the most influencial evolutionist of his time
Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) was a Victorian railway engineer who developed some ideas based on « evolution » as
a universal principle and built one of the most influencial system of his time, playing a major role in the
development of economics, politics, biology, and philosophy over a century (Spencer, 1855/62/64/74). His thinking
was derived from Lamarck, Darwin and von Baer. Spencer's evolution was a principle of necessary progress from
less to more complex. Mayr says « Spencer's views contributed nothing positive to Darwin's thinking; on the
contrary, they became a source of considerable subsequent confusion » (Mayr, 1982). Alhought he never worked
within research himself, and popularized his ideas by books directly intended for the public, Spencer's views
influenced most researchers of his time, like Haeckel, Ribot and Jackson, three Pierre Janet’s inspirators, and until
the present day, for instance, Karl Popper (Popper, 1972). His system most resembled the popular views of
evolution that persisted from Lamarck, involving belief in progressive development through stages to greater
complexity, which had been rejected by Darwin.
It was Spencer who coined the famous expression « survival of the fittest ». It was Spencer who popularized the
term « evolution » itself : around 1850, the term « evolution », traditionally used in embryology, started to be
employed for some epigenetic aspects of development. Gould notices that Carpenter (Principles of Physiology,
1851) was the first to use « "evolution" to describe both embryology and the fossil record (in a progressivistic and
creationist interpretation) » (Gould, 1977). From the moment Spencer called « evolution » Darwin’s theory,
« biologists appropriated his word and applied it to all organic change ». It’s also Spencer who coined the concept
contrary of evolution, « dissolution », for the reverse process, which was going to meet a huge favor among
physicians and psychologists (Ribot and Jackson, as for Pierre Janet’s inspirators).
As for our concern, Spencer’s strongest impacts had been : first, to link evolution to progress, which was the case
nor in Darwin’s, nor in Lamarck’s theory, inventing what Gould calls the « progressive evolution » (which was
finally discarded only by neo-Darwinian synthesis, around 1940). Spencer added a fundamental element to his
progressive evolution, a linear scale of progress, which is also a scale of perfection. A linear scale is an arrow : a
line (one dimension) plus a direction. On a linear scale, the only possible comparison between two elements is that
one is « inferior” or « superior » to the other, no difference in nature is supported : this feature accurately fits Pierre
Janet’s hierarchies. Second, to support a Lamarckian view of evolution, especially the modification of organs and
functions for adaptation purposes, and the transmission of these acquired characters (which was not doubted by
Darwin, but considered negligible).
Spencerian theories account for point 2 of Pierre Janet’s evolutionary views, according to which conducts evolve
and develop to adapt to circumstances, which explains that evolution goes towards perfection. Because it is dubious
that Pierre Janet ever read Darwin and Lamarck directly, but gained acointance with them through Spencer,
Spencerian theories also partially account for the points 1 and 4 previously quoted.
The theory of recapitulation : a universal Spencerian consensus in Pierre Janet’s time
Around 1900, Spencerian evolutionary theory supported an even more powerful one, the theory of recapitulation.
Stephen Jay Gould, one of its best specialists, has dedicated a treatise to it (“Ontogeny and phylogeny”, 1977).
When not otherwise stated, his subsequent quotations are from this book. As an introduction, he states :
« Recapitulation ranks among the most influential ideas of late nineteenth-century science. It dominated the work of
several professions […]. All these disciplines were obsessed with the idea of reconstructing evolutionary lineages,
and all regarded recapitulation as the key to this quest ».
Let’s read him further, introducing its main tenets :
« Recapitulation theory was developed most famously (from the earlier ideas of embryologist von Baer) by the
zoologist Ernst Haeckel, whose version proposed that embryos recapitulate the « stages » of « lower » adult animals
of the class concerned, often quoted as « ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny » : the tree of life might be read directly
from the embryological development of higher forms. An individual, in its own growth, passes through a series of
stages representing adult ancestral forms in their correct order--an individual, in short, climbs its own family tree ».
It’s worth noticing here that only a Lamarckian evolutionary view could have supported Heackelian recapitulation :
in effect, the characters acquired by adults must necessarily be transmitted to their descendance in order to express
during embryological development. The Spencerian view of evolution provided this favorable context. As Gould
explains:
« Although the body's tissues (soma) are most easily modified during adolescence, the reproductive cells are most
affected by constant repetition of an act during adulthood ».
The theory of recapitulation accounts for point 3 of Pierre Janet’s evolutionary views, according to which evolution
obeys Haeckel’s law.
The theory of recapitulation outside of its biological field, including Pierre Janet’s psychology
What was the research methodology supporting such views ? Gould explains :
« The classical argument for recapitulation involves a threefold parallelism of palaeontology, comparative anatomy,
and ontogeny ».
The research methodology of the recapitulation theory accounts for point 5 of Pierre Janet’s evolutionary views,
according to which inferior levels of perfection can be observed in children, primitives, apes, and neurotics, as
instances of low stages of evolution.
Gould enhances the accuracy of the situation, explaining that the « classical argument » of the threefold parallelism
has quickly been completed by the addition of a fourth one :
« Morphologists occasionally added a fourth source of evidence (…) the phyletic explanation of abnormalities as
developmental arrests ». And further, « since the human foetus passes through stages representing lower animals,
many abnormalities might be explained as arrests of development. The theory of developmental arrests was both
successful and influential (…); it added much prestige to the concept of recapitulation ».
Finally, and most interestingly for Pierre Janet’s work analysis, an ultimate addition :
« This fourth criterion -- the abnormal individual as an arrested juvenile -- forms an important part of the usage
made by other disciplines of the biogenetic law ».
We should add that in this fourth criterium lies some of Pierre Janet’s psychology and psychiatry interpretations. For
instance he viewed some symptoms of mental pathology, hysteria and psychastenia, as arrests of development.
In the following, the use of the « threefold parallelism » expression should be understood in its extended version, i.e.
including its fourth criterion, the developmental arrests.
The theory of developmental arrests accounts for point 6 of Pierre Janet’s evolutionary views, the last one we
isolated, according to which today’s remaining inferior levels can be explained by arrests (or regressions) of
development/evolution.
…but also to his readings and intellectual living masters
Not surprisingly in this historical context, several authors who mostly and directly oriented Pierre Janet’s thoughts
were highly convinced Lamarckians and recapitutionalists. Let’s only mention Ribot, Baldwin and Jackson.
T. Ribot
Théodule Ribot (1839-1916), a philosopher, prolific writer, is often quoted as the founder of French psychology, i.e.
its entering into research. In 1885, he was placed in charge of the first course in Experimental Psychology at the
Sorbonne. In 1888, a chair of Experimental and comparative psychology was created for him at the Collège de
France, the one Pierre Janet would take in 1901 after Ribot retired. He founded the « Revue Philosophique », an
important journal where Pierre Janet edited many articles. He encouraged the foundation in the Sorbonne of the first
French laboratory of experimental psychology, and has been its director.
T. Ribot has been very much inspired by Spencer and Jackson. He was the first to popularize Spencer to the French
with his book « La psychologie anglaise contemporaine ». About Spencer’s writings, he states « C’est le premier
essai vraiment scientifique [sic] d’une histoire des phases diverses que parcourt l’évolution de la vie mentale ». He
views Spencer’s attempts nothing less than the definitive burrial of the whole sensualist tradition : « Si on la
rapproche par la pensée des tentatives de Locke et de Condillac sur ce sujet, la genèse sensualiste paraîtra d’une
simplicité enfantine ». (Ribot, 1870).
Pierre Janet probably read all of Ribot’s books, and often quotes him as one of his greatest masters. In his 1919
College de France Lesson, he states that his own hierarchy is only an adaptation of Ribot’s one, which is not entirely
true, but worth recalling as a major acknowledgment.
J. Baldwin
Towards the end of the 19th century, under the influence of evolutionism, the first theories of psychological
development began to appear, but none was more important than the one of James M. Baldwin (1861–1934). His
major contribution to child psychology – one of the field's most seminal works – was his book Mental Development
in the Child and the Race. Methods and Processes. (Baldwin, 1895). Interpreting Heackel’s recapitulationism,
Baldwin suggested that there is an analogy between development of the individual and that of the species: « We find
more and more developed stages of conscious function in a series corresponding in the main with the stages of
nervous growth in the animals; and then we find this growth paralleled in its great features in the mental
development of the human infant ». (quoted by Wozniak, 1999).
Pierre Janet was admirative of Baldwin’s « genetic psychology », often promoted such an approach, and quoted him
several times from the years 1920 on. In « De l’angoisse à l’extase », for instance, he praises « Mental Development
in the Child and the Race » (at that time, Pierre Janet was about to quote the young J. Piaget also, who would later
give child psychology its modern form).
J. Jackson
Spencerian dissolution and recapitulation theory would provide for the basis of John Hughlings Jackson’s (18351911) neurological works. His goal was to illustrate « Spencer’s doctrines of nervous evolution, by the reverse
process of nervous dissolution, as this is effected by pathological processes » (quoted by Wozniak, 1999). Jackson
described how the nervous system is hierarchically organized in a series of complexity levels. He saw higher levels
as more complex combinations than lower ones, representing more recent steps in the brain’s evolution.
As soon as in 1893, Pierre Janet wrote an article about Jackson and Charcot (Janet, 1893a). As Claude Prévost states
it, Pierre Janet was very admirative of Jackson’s work, considering him the « English Charcot ». His hierarchy of
tendencies very much looks like Jackson’s neurological one, transposed in the psychological field (Pierre Janet’s
« dissociation », however, seems closer to Moreau de Tour’s desagregation than to Jackson’s Spencerian
dissolution).
This was a general trend. C. Prévost writes: « La psychopathologie, quant à elle, s’abandonne complètement au
jacksonisme, sous la houlette de Henri Claude, patron de Sainte-Anne à partir de 1920. Ce médecin s'avise que
Freud, en 1920, voit dans le « moi » une instance de synthèse et de contrôle du monde des instincts et qu'il révèle
son jacksonisme profond. Il aide à la fondation (1924) du Groupe de « L'Évolution Psychiatrique » qui réunit des
médecins, psychanalystes ou pas, mais tous jaksoniens; de là sortira en 1926, la Société Psychanalytique de Paris ».
Pierre Janet’s evolutionism faced to modern critiques of recapitulation : a crucial experiment
Pierre Janet has been most unfairly forgotten by international research, and that’s regrettable. But there’s maybe one
advantage to this sad situation. If he missed the many acknowledgments he deserved… he also missed the severe
critiques that close theories underwent when 19th century evolutionary biology has been proven false. The
consequence is that modern Janetians could be able – and certainly should – conduct these critiques by themselves,
highlighting what nevertheless remains relevant in Pierre Janet’s psychology, for contemporary research.
In « Phylogeny and ontogeny », Gould calls « pervasive influences » the impact of Lamarcko-Haeckelism on
several research fields outside biology, and dedicates one critical chapter to each of them, namely criminal
anthropology (Lombroso), racism and sexism, child development, primary education, and Freudism. Now that
Pierre Janet’s evolutionism has been characterized, it seems extremely interesting – and urgent – for Janetian
research to examine weither Pierre Janet indirectly falls into the scope of these critiques or not, and if so, to prepare
a reply to Gould as some first arguments for any coming historian of biology investigating Pierre Janet’s psychology
grounding.
Spencero-haeckelism as a support for racism
The threefold parallelism lead most researchers of that time, both in France and in America, to write and claim
statements we now consider crudely racist and sexist. As Gould points it out « Didn't everyone know that savages
and women are emotionally like children ? […] « They're like children » was no longer just a metaphor of bigotry; it
now embodied a theoretical claim that inferior people were literally mired in an ancestral stage of superior groups »
(Gould, 1981).
G. Hall, then an America's leading psychologist, stated in 1904 : « Most savages in most respects are children »
(Hall, 1904). H. Spencer, the apostle of social Darwinism, wrote : « The intellectual traits of the uncivilized... are
traits recurring in the children of the civilized » (Spencer, 1874). E. Cope (1887), one of the most famous American
neo-Lamarckians, an eminent palaeontologist and evolutionist, the first specialist of dinosaurs, writes « We all admit
the existence of higher and lower races, the latter being those which we now find to present greater or less
approximations to the apes... the most prominent characters of the negro are those of immature stages of the IndoEuropean race in its characteristic types ». In his best-selling book, B. Kidd (1898) supported American
imperialism using social Darwinism : « (We are) dealing with peoples who represent the same stage in the history of
the development of the race that the child does in the history of the development of the individual ».
French researchers were not less expressive. All threefold parallelism entities appear in T. Ribot : « Placez dans le
même milieu des êtres divers, une pierre, un arbre, un chien, un sauvage, un européen (…), chacun le réfléchira (…)
l’un très peu, l’autre beaucoup », or also « …de là nous tombons aux races humaines inférieures, qu’on ne peut
considérer comme pensantes, dont les conceptions numériques dépassent à peine celles du chien » and a bit later : «
…les quadrumanes, dont les actions sont tout aussi raisonnables que celles d’un petit écolier… » (Ribot, 1870). In
another book, he writes « À l’état naturel (…), le désir tend à se satisfaire immédiatement (…) les petits enfants, les
sauvages en fournissent d’excellents exemples » (Ribot, 1883).
Many very similar statements, some of them recalled above in this paper, have been made by Pierre Janet
throughout his entire work. It is therefore very important to realize that they relied on this prevailing mentality
around 1900. These passages from Pierre Janet’s works are obsolete and should be quoted only with maximal
cautiousness, or for historical purposes. Because in Pierre Janet’s system such statements directly refer to his
hierarchies (conduct, tendencies, reality, mental operations), his hierarchies have to be reformulated in the light of
modern biology also, before being quoted directly. A first approach could be to view his hierarchies as he presented
them in his works before 1909, i.e. before they became rooted in his evolutionary views, when they were heuristics
for psychological analysis and psychiatry, as they’re still used now in this field (Van der Hart, O. & al., 1989; Steele
& van der Hart, 2004).
Among Gould’s analysis, two points are concerning Janetian theory even more in depth : criminal anthropology
(Lombroso) and Freudism. The first one because Pierre Janet actively supported Lombroso, the second one because
Freudism is strongly relying on Pierre Janet’s results at its beginning, and the only dynamic psychology having
being criticized for its Lamarcko-Haeckelism. Let’s briefly examine Gould’s arguments and assess Pierre Janet’s
psychology in their light.
Spencero-Haeckelism as a support for biological determinism
Criminal anthropology had its roots in the works of Cesare Lombroso (1835-1909), who published the first edition
of L'uomo delinquente (« Criminal Man ») in 1876. It spread widely and became one of the most important
scientific and social movements of the late nineteenth century. Gould recalls « Evolutionary theory quickly became
the primary weapon to establish a rational and scientific social order ».
According to Lombroso, criminals were born with an almost unavoidable predisposition to crimes : they were
« born criminals », and could be identified by some anatomical signs. Their stigmata didn’t come from disease or
hereditary disorders, they were the atavistic features of an evolutionary past. The born criminal acts his way because
« he is, literally, a savage in our midst ».
Pierre Janet felt immediate sympathy for Lombroso’s theory. He reviewed its first French translations and
comments from 1893 to 1897 (Janet, 1893b/93c/94a/94b/97). Pierre Janet’s commitment to this serious historical
impasse must be acknowledged, and Gould’s critique faced.
Spencero-Haeckelism as a support for psycho-anthropogonies
The Gould & Sulloway’s (Gould, 1977; Sulloway, 1979) critique of Freud focuses on Freud’s use of the
recapitulation theory. Though Freud’s books have been endlessly commented since a hundred years, it’s not the case
of his evolutionary views, and as Gould writes, « the central role of recapitulation in his entire system has rarely
been noted ». Gould ascribes this to the regrettable fact that « so few psychologists and historians have any inkling
of Haeckel's doctrine and its impact ».
Gould and Sulloway recall that Freud clearly claimed his Lamarckist and recapitulationist positions.
« Freud was a devout recapitulationist – and he said so clearly and often: "Each individual somehow recapitulates in
an abbreviated form the entire development of the human race" (Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, 1916) ».
Or also « In the Three Essays of 1905, Freud wrote that oral and anal stages "almost seem as though they were
harking back to early animal forms of life" ». We saw that Pierre Janet’s positions were quite similar, and that he
didn’t ever hide them either. Gould’s critique is relevant for Pierre Janet also.
Gould and Sulloway argue that the recapitulation theory has a central position in Freud’s theory of neurosis. The
stages of mind appear in phyletic order during ontogeny. Although the earlier stages are repressed in the healthy
adult, they don’t disappear : « the repressed, primitive core continues to "reside" in the adult brain ». Stated this
way, this is a process Pierre Janet’s theory could validate also. This description could in fact be the one of Pierre
Janet’s hierarchy of conducts and related mental operations, supporting important aspects of his own theory of
neurosis.
According to Gould and Sulloway, this view of mental recapitulation directly explains that, for Freud, « sexual
energy (libido) […] can be compulsively fixed at levels of development prior to maturity by traumatic events of
early childhood ». This point is most relevant for Janetian research, because Freud’s early views on traumatic events
– which he later gave up – originate in Pierre Janet’s works on hysteria. What’s more Pierre Janet never abandoned
this interpretation and even gave it a more accurate shape in « Les Névroses ». This point refers to the
developmental arrests, which according to Pierre Janet explain the neurosis in so far as they are « des arrêts de
l’évolution des fonctions ».
Gould and Sulloway show that for Freud, « neuroses are not only the abnormal retention of stages appropriate to
children; they also represent the expression of ancestral tendencies – an atavism to be shunned in any progressivist
reading of evolution ». There is no doubt that this description very well fits Pierre Janet’s own views on neuroses, as
his extended use of the threefold parallelism has attested above.
Gould is especially severe – even cynical – with Freud’s attempt to generalize his mental recapitulationist theory.
« From this conviction, Freud embarked upon his most ambitious project for recapitulation: nothing less than the
reconstruction of human history from psychological data on the development of children and neurotics. […] stages
in the history of civilization ». Although Pierre Janet may be said slightly less ambitious, some of his late projects
are very similar to the one Gould is criticizing – almost mocking – here. Recapitulation inspired Pierre Janet to
develop his theory of the evolution of personality, of the evolution of the concept of time, of the origin and
development of language and intelligence. There is no doubt that the recapitulationist grounding of these important
Janetian works must be urgently questioned, and his related ideas updated.
Gould and Sulloway attempted this critique to invalidate Freud’s psychology and theory of neurosis, at a time Freud
was still working within international research (i.e. before 1899). The question for Janetian research hence becomes
to know weither its Lamarcko-Haeckelian grounding alters Pierre Janet’s psychology or not. To address this
question, let’s first briefly recall how Lamarckism and Haeckelism were invalidated by modern biology, and what
replaced them.
The birth of modern biology : how janetian evolutionary views collapsed
Modern genetics makes Lamarckism fall first…
In 1900, H. de Vries rediscovers Mendel’s principles. In 1915, T. Morgan develops the chromosomal theory of the
genes, setting the basis of modern genetics, and quickly invalidating the possibility of acquired characters
transmission. As a consequence, Lamarckism had collapsed in the 1920s among biologists. Nevertheless, it
remained well alive far longer, outside of biology, till the 1940s and the neo-Darwinian synthesis. Lamarkism
survived even longer in France, because of resistances to Mendelian genetics partly explained by A. Comte’s
Positivism (Gayon & Burian, 2004). It fact it is dubious that Pierre Janet ever realized that his lifelong beliefs about
it were false.
… and the theory of recapitulation soon follows
Because the theory of recapitulation needed an acquired inheritance mechanism, especially for its addition and
condensation laws, « when Mendelians discarded the inheritance of acquired characters, they also rejected the most
promising theoretical basis for the biogenetic law », as Gould states it. Nevertheless, only a direct assault against
these specific laws made it eventually collapse.
The theory of recapitulation held two major tenets. The first one was that new features are added in evolution to the
end of ancestral ontogenies, so that the phylogeny of adult stages parallels the ontogeny of the most advanced
descendant : this is the law of terminal addition. The second was that the length of ontogeny being limited, stages
are either shortened or deleted, to make room for new features added terminally : this is the law of condensation.
T. Morgan attacked terminal addition by arguing that these genetic substitutions can be expressed at any point in
ontogeny : the genes that control characters are present from conception, and evolutionary changes occur by
mutational substitutions that can be added at any moment in the process, not especially at its end. The law of
condensation was dashed by the discovery of the genes controlling the rates processes (and later the Homeobox
genes), which showed that retardation of somatic characters (paedomorphosis) occurs as much as their acceleration
(recapitulation), depending on which trait is considered.
Recapitulation was abandoned as a universal proposition but remained regarded as but one possible result of a more
general process, heterochrony, i.e. alteration of times and rates to produce acceleration and retardation in the
ontogenetic development of some specific characters.
Then comes the modern Darwinian evolutionary neo-synthesis
The modern Darwinian evolutionary neo-synthesis brought together Charles Darwin's theory of the evolution of
species by natural selection with Mendel’s genetics as the basis for biological inheritance. Major figures in the
development of the modern synthesis include T. Dobzhansky, J. Haldane, J. Huxley and E. Mayr.
According to the modern synthesis as established in the 1930s and 1940s (Haldane, 1932; Dobzhansky, 1937;
Huxley, 1942; Mayr, 1942), the relevant entity for evolution is not the individual anymore, but the geographically
isolated population (a sub-group of the species). Genetic variation in populations doesn’t arise to adapt the
individual – nor the population – to its environment, but by chance, through mutation and recombination. Evolution
consists of changes in the frequencies of alleles between one generation and another as a result of genetic drift, gene
flow and natural selection. Speciation occurs when populations are reproductively isolated. Natural selection
maintains the genetic variations that are not dangerous for the survival, and eliminates the other ones.
Recent approaches came to question the usefulness of considering populations genetics to address evolutionary
issues (Eldredge & Gould, 1972/88a; Kimura, M. & Ohta, 1974; Weiss & Fullerton, 2000). Eldredge, Gould and
Kimura, now largely followed in evolutionary biology, initially presented strong arguments that natural selection
may play a weaker role in evolution than what previously thought. According to ponctuated equilibrium,
palaeontological records document weak evidence to species gradual adaptation to the environment but rather long
« stasis » interrupted by catastrophic ecologic changes (extinctions) (Gould & Eldredge, 1971/93; Gould,
1978a/82/92). These catastrophic events may have shaped species evolution and the present aspect of life on Earth
far more than natural selection. The consequence is that adaptative structures are rare, and what is mostly observed
are « spandrels », i.e. non-adaptative structures as non dangerous by-products of genetic drift (Gould & Lewontin,
1979; Gould, 1997). According to the neutralist approach, most part of the genetic drift has no impact on the species
steadiness, it’s « neutral », not even seen by natural selection. Other attempts directly address the relevance of
genetics in evolution, promoting a reformulation of the genotype – phenotype evolutionary link (Weiss & Fullerton,
2000).
These advances have in common to question the weight such processes as adaptation (Gould & Vrba, 1982) and
natural selection (Eldredge & Gould, 1988b) really had in the evolutionary history, these mechanisms being
probably less frequent than was thought in the 1940s.
A guideline to assess and reformulate Pierre Janet’s 6 point evolutionary views
We have seen that Pierre Janet’s evolutionary views entirely pertained to the dominant paradigm in his time, sharing
each of its components. We have seen which major changes genetics and neo-Darwinism introduced in the field of
evolutionary biology, making it very different today than it was around 1900, as Pierre Janet knew it. Because of the
relationship that’s been assumed between Pierre Janet’s psychology and his evolutionary views, which is a
grounding / causality one, possibly broken regarding its main corpus, no evolutionary advances can damage his
psychology main results. But it’s time now to check how the borderline concepts isolated in his quotations behave in
the light of modern biology, and could damage this grounding link itself.
In Pierre Janet’s time, Lamarcko-recapitutionalism unified palaeontology, comparative anatomy, ontogeny and
psychiatry under evolutionary biology. Because of this common evolutionary causal factor, Pierre Janet and other
authors often exemplified their results by reference to any of the unified disciplines. Now that this erroneous view
has vanished, this doesn’t mean that there are no conceptual links anymore between these domains. What changed is
the nature of the link.
When evolution ceased to be the leading and unifying concept for palaeontology, comparative anatomy, ontogeny
and mental disease, the threefold domains referred less, temporarily, to biology, and also to each others. When the
neo-Darwinian synthesis came out, these disciplines separately started a new relationship to evolutionary biology,
but remained each apart. Then interdisciplinarity developed within international research, and they built new bonds
between each other. Finally, evolutionary biology became more appealing outside of biology again, and now, many
research fields are developing an « evolutionary » sub-discipline, evolutionary psychology and evolutionary
psychiatry for instance (because the recapitulation link is broken and has not been replaced by such a powerful
concept, all these evolutionary trends are still highly debated).
As a consequence, the question for Pierre Janet’s theory is a double one : how is it possible to analyse the link he
made between these different domains, and the link he made between all these domains and evolutionary biology.
Let’s return to the components of Pierre Janet’s view on evolution, as they’ve been isolated previously, and confront
them to modern biology advances.
1 – Evolution is double sided. On one hand it’s a gradual transformation of the individual during its daily life, on the
other hand, it is the transformation of its « race », which takes place over longer periods.
Around 1900, the term « evolution » « meant development in most biological contexts (…) and was strongly
associated with preformationism » (Burian, 2000). According to Burian, Darwin avoided to use it explicitly because
of its developmental connotation, a step towards confusion that Spencer was the one to make. By adding an
evolutionary meaning to the word « evolution », Spencer made it become a perfect supporter of recapitulation, now
bearing its two tenets at once, ontogeny and phylogeny. Burian adds that developmental uses of the term
« evolution » remained in effect till the 1960s, though « most biologists abandoned the developmental connotations
of the term by the 1920s, thanks to the creation of separate disciplines to deal with the problems of embryological
development, of evolution (i.e. origins of species, macroevolution, biogeography, Darwinian selection, etc.), and of
heredity ». This separation of the disciplines occurred when the Haeckelo-Lamarckian evolutionary views collapsed,
and marks the beginning of the period when the previously unified fields of the threefold parallelism felt
autonomous. Then the word « evolution » gave up its first meaning, the one in embryological development, and
retained only the one we know now.
One of the major changes due to the adoption of the Darwinist view is that the threefold parallelism disciplines lost
their unity, hence the concept of « evolution » lost its polysemy, its various meanings becoming distributed over the
newly separated domains, with other words. The changes that occur in one’s conduct or body during life didn’t
pertain to evolutionary biology anymore. Research in evolutionary biology focused on processes occurring at the
species (what Pierre Janet called the « race ») time scale, typically a few millions years.
Pierre Janet’s view on evolution is then half correct only, as the Lamarckian one where it comes from : evolution
has now only one meaning, the one of the species. At the individual level, it is not « evolution » anymore, but
whatever issue is dealt with regarding one single individual. From this point of view, it is a problem to keep the term
« adaptation », so connoted by evolutionary concerns, to address individual conducts. Piaget avoided the problem by
splitting it in « assimilation » and « accomodation », in a field we would now call « learning » rather than
« adaptation ». Modern cognitive sciences would call « cognition » what Pierre Janet named « adaptation ». A
modern dynamic psychology could use the word « reaction » instead of « adaptation », for Pierre Janet continuously
stated that conducts are reactions, to either internal or external events.
Le’s now examine the links between Janetian conducts and evolutionary biology, past and modern.
Viewing the conducts of one individual as an issue directly pertaining to evolutionary biology (past or modern), as
Pierre Janet did, must be discarded as a typical Haeckelo-Lamarckian position. Viewing the species evolution of
conducts directly pertaining to evolutionary biology must be discarded too, for the same reasons.
Since the recapitulationist link has been broken, has any new link appeared in contemporary research, between
conducts, the evolution of conducts, and evolutionary biology ? Yes. After the neo-Darwinian synthesis, the fields
of conducts and the one of their evolution started a new kind of link with evolutionary biology, which preserved
each discipline autonomy : interdisciplinarity.
Pierre Janet’s theory of conducts can be considered autonomous in its psychological field, and probably even his
theory about the evolution of conducts, provided its grounding in Spencer is cautiously erased (the method for doing
this would necessitate another article). But it might be possible to link Pierre Janet’s views about conducts and their
evolution to modern evolutionary biology. This would be as relevant as the causal link between conducts and
biology is relevant itself.
There are many endeavors, currently, that develop interdisciplinary fields addressing this link. For instance,
evolutionary psychology and evolutionary psychiatry, following sociobiology. Independently of these fields
relevance in itself (Gould, 1978b), there’s no doubt that a Janetian point of view would be very useful, in particular
to give some psychological meaning to the concepts employed by the neurologists and biologists of this emerging
domains. Many attempts are undertaken, for instance, to explain emotions physiologically, although no dynamic
psychology has been consulted about what an emotion is, and what kind of emotions there are in humans. According
to Pierre Janet, there are four primary emotions (or feelings) : effort, fatigue, triumph and failure. Fear for instance,
which is strongly debated nowadays, is no primary feeling, but a combination of effort and failure. There would be
great interest in considering these Janetian dynamic results before looking for neurological grounding of entities
deprived of psychological meaning.
2 – Conducts evolve and develop to adapt ever better to circumstances : they are useful. As a consequence,
evolution goes towards perfection.
The fact that the conducts are adapted (or not) must be kept independent of evolutionary biology results : current
researches in biological evolution don’t give a causal role to the individuals conducts regarding their species
survival over geological times. At the level of geological times, since the neo-synthesis came out, the causal role on
species survival is known to be played by populations (isolated local groups of individuals of the same species), not
individuals themselves. What’s more, natural selection acts upon the populations genes pools, not their conducts.
Populations genes pools are the relevant entities concerned by genetic variations, hence Darwinian natural selection.
As for individual conducts, they command the individual survival over its own time scale, independently of its
species. The question of the conducts « utility » that Pierre Janet addressed has to be unconnected from evolutionary
biology, to follow modern biological research. It must be kept at the second level he suggested, the one of the
individual life, and this is the level of psychology.
In the light of modern advances questioning the weight of adaptation as a shaping force for organisms, the
evolutionary « utility » of a conduct loses relevance, not only at the individual level, but even at the population level
: most conducts could have been different – and are in fact, even within the same ecological niches – independently
of any evolutionary strain or benefit. They obey the principle of not being dangerous, not the one of being useful,
i.e. « adapted ».
As for the addition of « progress » to Lamark and Darwin’s theories, both initially devoided of this idea, it was
Spencer’s (re-)invention. Though it has remained intact in the layman intuition till nowadays, it’s been strongly
discarded in research since the neo-synthesis, which acknowledged the fact that it relied on an anthropocentric view
of evolution, coming out of religious and philosophical traditions. One of the aspects of Gould’s work was to show
how this idea of « progress » was tightly bonded to the idea of « life complexification » over time, which is in fact
an anthropological bias also, unless calling life human brain phylogeny over the last one thousands of Earth history
(Gould, 1987/91).
Pierre Janet’s claims about progress and utility in biological evolution must be considered false, typically
Spencerian, and avoided by modern Janetian research.
Pierre Janet’s claims about progress and utility in psychological evolution could be addressed by Janetian research,
provided they are well decoupled from the Spencerian grounding that he provided them. There are two ways of
performing this. The first one is to deal with psychological evolution in relation to modern evolutionary biology, in
the way mentioned previously. The second one is to deal with psychological evolution without any relation to
evolutionary biology, past or modern. Current interdisciplinarity offers several such opportunities within
international research. Human prehistory, especially palaeo-ethnology, provides much behavioral data from lower to
upper palaeolithic, a rich and direct source of evidence for evolutionary psychology (Saillot, 2002a; Saillot & al.,
2002b; Wynn, 1979/85). An indirect source would provide useful support also : compared psychology, with a
methodological questionable bridge from « compared » to « evolutionary » interpretations (Saillot & al., 2000).
Some authors address both issues using a psychological reading grid (Wynn, 2002). Animal cognition yields very
interesting results, bearing in mind that animals, no more than children, are « inferior » drafts of humans, but rather
different systems, as much evolved as us, but in other directions.
Like in evolutionary psychology, Pierre Janet’s results would be of the utmost interest to clarify the psychological
concepts relevant to these interdisciplinary investigations, especially here, where laboratory or field experimentation
is necessary.
3 – Evolution obeys Haeckel’s law : it is recapitulated by the embryo (organic) development.
Pierre Janet makes few direct references to Haeckel. But his Haeckelism is typical, displaying the 4 laws pattern
summarized by Gould, the threefold parallelism (palaeontology, comparative anatomy, ontogeny) and its « fourth
source of evidence », the one of psychiatry : developmental arrests.
As a biological law, Haeckel’s recapitulation cannot be sustained anymore : any direct reference to it from Pierre
Janet must be considered both obsolete and false.
As an evolutionary analogy, the links that Pierre Janet makes between his views and other fields can still be
addressed, provided the cautiousness suggested above, about points 1 & 2.
4 – Anciant functions already have dedicated organs. But progresses and inventions from the individuals are
currently creating future organs, by direct transmission of daily adaptations to the descendance.
There’s a double issue here. What is definitely wrong, first, is that current conducts are forming outlines of organs,
and second, that an outline of organ, if ever created by the conduct, would be transmitted to the descendance,
because transmission of inherited characters doesn’t exist. So there is no way to keep this Pierre Janet’s statement
while remaining at a biological level.
On the contrary, Pierre Janet’s statement keeps its originality if we confine his concept of invention and progress at
the individual life scale, and at a strict psychological level. A way to put this is to consider psychological functions.
Pierre Janet explains that each function is distributed on levels ranging from automatism to consciousness, one given
level being the awareness of the one just below. Invention and progress are good concepts at the psychological level,
within one’s life : some individuals invent new conducts or ways of thinking : this process occurs at the superior
level of the function, the part that is most conscious and complex to achieve. These new upper levels will be
transmitted to future generations, and finally become common for everybody.
This Pierre Janet statement is in fact what current sociology and social psychology call « culture transmission ». It’s
a promissing topic in these fields, and should be addressed in depth with the help of a Janetian dynamic psychology,
along with sociological related issues, as recently shown (Oulahbib, 2004).
5 – Evolution and its embryologic analogy, passes through a series of stages or levels of perfection. Inferior levels of
this progression can be observed today in children, primitives, apes, and neurotic people.
Though independent they now seem to us, Pierre Janet addressed all the related fields as mere sub-disciplines of the
unified Spencero-Haeckelian theory of evolution. His typical recapitulationist view lead him to view these
populations as « inferiors », a low level on the ladder of perfection.
If we might indulge in a psychiatric analogy, it’s a puzzling situation that Pierre Janet was the one who so cleverly
promoted « positive » symptoms of hysteria and psychastenia, and that, regarding children, primitives, apes and
criminals, he didn’t notice anything else than their « negative » features, making them all incomplete and weak
versions of sane occidental adults... Let’s have a closer look at Pierre Janet’s positions regarding children and
« primitives », and assess their relevance for modern Janetian research.
Children : Pierre Janet didn’t do any experimental study on children. Nevertheless he was willing to see children
studies develop, and warmly praised J. Piaget’s early works (who in his turn admired Pierre Janet a lot). Confident
in his recapitulationist position, Pierre Janet assumed that such studies would confirm his evolutionary hierarchy.
J. Piaget’s later works (Piaget, 1950) didn’t support Pierre Janet’s evolutionary views, nor the following
developmental researches. Piaget’s stages finally built a cognitive developmental pattern bearing no direct link to
Pierre Janet’s hierarchy of actions, and only a remote resemblance, more an analogy than a conceptual link. Now
that the field of cognitive development has grown so much, it is not possible anymore to regard children cognition
as a poor version of the adults one, but it is known to be a different kind of cognition with its own set of laws. The
laws of children cognition are different from the adult ones, not inferior. To go on with our psychiatric analogy,
children cognition has many more « positive » features than « negative » ones, and needs a comparison criterion not
only linear (only « superior » or « inferior » levels) but supporting differences in the nature of the elements.
A few Pierre Janet’s statements about children inferiority may be validated by the experiments consisting in looking
for adult processing in children cognition (negative features), but these are studies aside from this field main goal
which is now to investigate the specific laws of children cognition, the positive features not shared by adults, which
hence cannot enter a linear hierarchy, where all differences in nature were impossible.
Pierre Janet’s statements about children intelligence must often be discarded because of their confidence in a linear
progressist recapitulation, allowing children to be weak adults only.
But there are some Pierre Janet statements related to children which may be relevant to modern janetian research.
Pierre Janet provided many encouragements to the investigations about children intelligence, and this should
certainly be continued. And in the same vein, it would be very interesting to study children dynamic psychology,
which Pierre Janet didn’t do because he thought children were simply lacking adults features : there may be janetian
psychological concepts to discover in children dynamic psychology, if it was addressed.
« Primitives » : Pierre Janet never studied the « primitives », and didn’t develop a personal opinion about them,
generally – and often – quoting Lévy-Bruhl (Lévy-Bruhl, 1910/22/27). Nor did he support further investigations
about the « primitives », probably considering that Lévy-Bruhl had reached the essential, already regarding his
results as a confirmation of his own hierarchy.
Pierre Janet wrongly included Lévy-Bruhl’s ideas into his Haeckelian hierarchical frame, viewing primitives as an
inferior level of his linear hierarchy, though Lévy-Bruhl was explicitly against such a view : he was opposed to an
evolutionary – Spencerian – interpretation of his works, supporting mental « relativism” and the equivalence of
logic and pre-logic « mental systems », away from any hierarchical dominance. Yet Lévy-Bruhl was impeded by the
importance he gave to the non-contradiction logic principle, a problem that was to be solved only – one year after
Pierre Janet’s death – by structural anthropology (Lévy-Strauss, 1948/49/62) and later, by Boudon (Boudon,
1986/90).
With this logics problem solved at last, anthropology definitively condemned the notion of a « pre-logic » mind,
weither evolutionary or relativistic. Drawing on these results, Boudon showed that « pre-logic » mentality (as LévyBruhl had identified it) is one of the common and various ways of thinking in modern societies also : the belief in
the existence of a distinct « primitive mind », bearing special/inferior properties different from that of modern mind,
vanished. As a result, the entire research field about « primitive mind » collapsed, being deprived of its object.
Thanks to this conceptual relaxing, current research in ethnology is now a huge enlargement of the past one,
expanding its field, for instance, to occidental local or functional sub-populations (suburban groups, peasants,
professional corporations).
Pierre Janet’s quotes about a « primitive » mentality ought to be rejected as he expressed them.
Nevertheless, a Janetian dynamic psychology should consider modern ethnology – and especially its recent extents –
as a rich reservoir of the psychological entities Pierre Janet described and defined throughout his works : actions,
languages, ideas, beliefs, knowledge. It would be a remarkable research advance that the ethnology/anthropology
past or recent observations receive their first dynamic psychology interpretation, and Janetian psychological
concepts are ready, and particularly suited, for this.
6 – Today’s remaining inferior levels can be explained by arrests or regressions of development (or evolution).
As law of evolutionary biology, the theory of arrests of development cannot be sustained anymore : any reference to
it from Pierre Janet must be considered false.
As quoted previously, Pierre Janet used this erroneous law to explain the neurosis symptoms in « Les Névroses ».
Because these symptoms are usefully described by such a law, an interesting question would be to inquire about a
possible psychological law replacing the biological one, and playing the same role to elucidate the symptoms. As a
psychological law, this new principle would certainly bear some differences with the one Pierre Janet had in mind,
and such differences would be interesting to investigate in dynamic psychiatry.
Conclusion
Like most of the scholars in his time, Pierre Janet grounded his psychological theory in a biological evolutionism
now entirely discarded by modern research in biology. Apart from being false, this evolutionary model was
« pervasive », as Gould calls it, in its applications outside of biology, included psychology, bearing direct support to
that time’s racism, colonialist imperialism, social, political and genetic determinism, esoteric psycho-anthropogonies
and their related therapy attempts.
Because of its epistemological « grounding » nature, Pierre Janet’s evolutionism didn’t impair his dynamic
psychology, for on one hand, the causality link can be broken, and on the other hand, its manifestations arise only at
a few borderline concepts, none of them belonging to Pierre Janet’s psychology main corpus.
Pierre Janet’s psychology main corpus is built with the concepts of Force, Tension and their oscillations (supporting
the « dynamic » nature of his psychology), actions, conducts, tendencies, ideas, beliefs, will, emotions and feelings.
No evolutionary concept enters the model of these psychological entities definitions and interactions, which Pierre
Janet fathomed to criticize the available psychologies in his time, mainly the ones of Descartes, Locke, Condillac,
Maine De Biran and Bergson. Pierre Janet’s psychodynamic model is fully autonomous. What’s more, not only is it
compatible with any modern research field, but it invites many future investigations in the related research
disciplines, besides the fact that it’s probably the best one ever produced, at a time dynamic psychology was still an
international research investigation, that has regrettably disappeared short after his death, surviving only within
private communities outside of research.
Pierre Janet is often quoted as the promotor of a hierarchy of conducts or tendencies. In fact, what is still not
acknowledged today is that Pierre Janet produced (at least) four different hierarchies : conducts, tendencies, reality
and mental operations, each of these bearing different features, and especially different frontiers along the same
axis. All these hierarchies were strongly rooted in his obsolete evolutionary views. Despite this epistemological
weakness, their heuristic utility in dynamic psychology and psychiatry cannot be questioned (this will yield a
detailed future argumentation), and they’re still so useful in their domains that the method to update them in light of
modern research should be considered a most valuable investigation in itself.
However minor Pierre Janet’s evolutionary commitment has been, it certainly cannot be neglected. On the contrary,
Pierre Janet’s errors must be recognized and criticized, within international research, as he’s always wished himself
for he knew that research mainly relies on the specialists international critiques. More than 50 years have passed
since Pierre Janet wrote his last texts and his modern followers start promoting his brilliant works. But research and
its product, knowledge, has increased ever more during this period, all research fields of Pierre Janet’s time having
diversified into many sub-specialties each more accurate than the others. So there’s an urgent need to chase the dust
away of Pierre Janet’s thoughts before using them, for they are still in the state he left them 50 years ago. Any
reference to Pierre Janet’s evolutionary views is highly dubious today, and modern Janetians should either avoid
them, or overtly argue about their irrelevance, in the spirit to enhance the confidence his groundbreaking dynamic
psychology should inspire to us, as a fully autonomous discipline well worth addressing within research. This article
aims at being a modest, first help for this.
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