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Modernism without Janet?
Michael Cotsell
Department of English
University of Delaware
Memorial Hall 309
Newark DE 19716,USA
mcotsell@udel.edu
My book “The Theater of Trauma: The Psychological Struggle for the American Mind,
1910-1930” (Peter Lang Publishing, April 2005) argues the influence of the psychiatry of Janet
and his French and American colleagues on American modernist drama. In this article, I will try
to sketch a somewhat wider case for the influence of both Janet’s psychiatry and his philosophy
on Modernism as a whole. For this purpose I have selected T. S. Eliot, James Joyce and Franz
Kafka for particular attention but will discuss other figures in passing, including pre-modernists
such as James and Proust and thinkers such as William James. I shall even attempt to sketch a
case about Gertrude Stein, Pablo Picasso and Cubism. The question of Janet’s literary influence
after the peak years of Modernism is also discussed.
*
The answer to this question must be both a resounding “Yes!” and a more resounding
“No!” Yes, we have had Modernism without Janet, a Modernism which was automatically and
always associated with Freud (Cotsell, 2005, 296, n.41); still today, if I address a conference
session of my colleagues in literary studies, even modernist literary studies, I must always
explain who Janet was. “No,” because, despite this critical and scholarly omission, Janet is at the
very heart of Modernism from about 1890 to the late 1920s, as a direct influence on other
thinkers and on literary authors; as an indirect influence; and as the central expression of a
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psychiatry that affected many modernist writers and thinkers (need it be said, including Freud).
Some part of this paper will be spent on justifying the above propositions. My book The Theater
of Trauma has made this case in detail for American modernist drama, including the major work
of Eugene O’Neill and Susan Glaspell. Some American dramatists knew Janet personally
(August Thomas, The Harvest Moon, 1909); some were directly influenced by his work (T. S.
Eliot); others, like Gertrude Stein, were influenced by Janet via William James, whose Principles
of Psychology, even in its abbreviated high school form ( which was known to students as
“Jimmy”) cites Janet on multiple personality at some length. O’Neill, on the other hand—
perhaps along with D. H. Lawrence—appears to be the artist whose work has been most subject
to both Freudian interpretation and complaint about that influence. O’Neill is also the rare case
among modernist dramatists in the US who seems to have experienced no direct or indirect
acquaintance with dissociationist psychiatry as such. Nevertheless, his work is deeply involved
with the themes of that psychiatry—packed with doubles (The Great God Brown, Days Without
End), trance-like dissociated states (Strange Interlude), automata (The Hairy Ape, Mourning
becomes Electra, etc.), all-embracing abulia (The Iceman Cometh), and traumatic terror (The
Emperor Jones, etc.). O’Neill is the great genius of the American Theater of Trauma.
Freud and Jung attached their ideas to traditional symbols and mythologies to give
cultural substance to their speculations. Otto Rank, especially, became the great popularizer of
the narrative tradition as Freudian. (His work needs to be rewritten from the perspectives of
contemporary anthropology and dissociationist psychiatry.) Jung tendentiously linked his client’s
dreams with mythological symbols, thereby, with typical modesty, laying claim to world
mythology as a whole. We have been less ready to recognize central symbolic figures and motifs
in Janetian psychiatry, largely because Janet himself did not make this turn to mythic
reinforcement or grandiosity. Yet the symbols and motifs that characterize his work and that of
his contemporaries are there to be found. Strikingly they include elements that may have a
considerable past but also have a particular modernist provenance. They include the Svengali and
Vampire (inventions or re-inventions of Janet’s time); the Double and dedoublement in their
many manifestations; the Automaton or Somnambulist; the Outcast or Pariah. In keeping, the
Human Automaton, the Nightmare Machine—the “mechanical Symbol” (as Hogan 1965, 37,
calls it), along with the nightmare workplace or city dominates Expressionist drama as the
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mechanism of bureaucracy does Kafka and a haunting automatism the London Eliot’s The Waste
Land. Such generalization of trauma and dissociation to a whole environment, society, or
landscape is especially noticeable after World War I, an event that gave the ideas of trauma and
dissociation new currency, and enabled them for a time to override Freud in the modernist mind.
The longer history of such motifs and figures is not difficult to perceive. Ancient
mythical motifs of absolute power, empire, and war; of scapegoating and sacrifice; of devouring
and dismemberment; of the loss of will to some dark power; of fragmentation and
metamorphosis; of ghastly disembodiment or stony frozenness; of possession and exorcism—all
speak to Janet’s perceptions and were deployed by literary artists in the epoch he influenced so
deeply.
Taking the view that in the past, as now, trauma and dissociation were widespread, we
can think of these experiences as “variable constants”. As well, as Morton Prince always
insisted, we all employ dissociation in some degree; language itself allows us to both tell the
truth and lie, both to ourselves as to others (“Human kind/ Cannot bear much reality” as Eliot
remarked); or as Swiss psychologist Clarapède remarked, the very idea of will implies division
and doubling (ed. Campbell et al, 1925, 37-4). Even a little thought will quickly convince us that
families and societies traumatize and dissociate on a very large scale, indeed that they practice
traumatization and dissociation. Therefore it may not be possible to have an adequate psychology
or sociology without including dissociation—I believe all of René Girard’s work points to this
conclusion. Of course, the formations of trauma and dissociation vary enormously from culture
to culture. The Modernist period stands out not just because it was a traumatic time (it was) but
because it is the time in which the contemporary language of dissociation and trauma evolved.
Eugene O’Neill initially found his way to a dissociationist vocabulary through popular
and great nineteenth-century fiction, leading themes of which are the double, mesmerism and
suggestion. As Janet himself realized in his early studies, dissociative disorders had been
anticipated by the early mesmerists and magnetizers. Correspondingly, in literature, first there
was the Romantic Döppelganger of Jean Paul, Coleridge, E. T. A. Hoffman, and others. Poe
(“William Wilson”, “The Murder on Rue Morgue,” etc), Hawthorne (The Blithedale Romance,
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1852) and Dickens (Our Mutual Friend, 1864-5; The Mystery of Edwin Drood, 1870) are
familiar mid-century purveyors of such material. Consider also this passage from Melville’s
Moby Dick (1851):
For, at such times, crazy Ahab, the scheming unappeasedly steadfast hunter of the white whale;
this Ahab that gone to his hammock, was not the agent that so caused him to burst from it again. The latter
was the eternal, living principle or soul in him; and in sleep, being for the time dissociated from the
characterizing mind, which at other times employed it for its outer vehicle or agent, it spontaneously south
escape from the scorching contiguity of the frantic thing, of which it was no longer an integral. Bat as the
mind does not exist unless leagued with the soul, therefore it must have been that, in Ahab’s case, yielding
up all his thoughts and fancies to one supreme purpose; that purpose by its own sheer inveteracy of will,
forced itself against gods and devils into a kind of self-assumed, independent being of its own. (Chapter 44)
Virginia Floyd has observed that the concept of “‘the duality of Man’s Psyche’…reverberates
throughout” O’Neill’s work (Floyd, 1985, 32). O’Neill remarked that two of the most profound
influences on his art were those of Dostoevsky and Strindberg (Dostoevsky’s Notes from the
Underground gave the double a new terrible authenticity). Surely Dostoevsky was the most
influential nineteenth-century author on Modernism generally? In Crime and Punishment, for
instance, not only did Dostoevsky continue with the device of doubling, but vividly provided the
negative conditions of the new modern subjectivity: childhood hurt; urbanism and industrialism;
appalling poverty and middle-class guilt, particularly after the failures of 1848; the envy inherent
in a mass society; the loneliness and anonymity of the city; the cruelty and bureaucracy of
government; the decline of religion; the gap between human idealism and social reality;
insecurity of gender (typically masculinity) and the stirrings of feminism (typically expressed in
one stage or another of hysteria, as with the Brontës). The modern individual faced a void of
meaning. She had to find the basis for it within him or her self, which meant experiencing the
capacity for evil (in Crime and Punishment, the murder of the old lady, the paedophilia and
suicide of the double, Svidrigaylov) as well as virtue. Immediately an important point from
Janet’s Les Obsessions et les névroses comes to mind. Janet comments that obsession, even
sexual obsession, and especially sexual perversion, is not so much due to not to repressed libido,
but to compensation for a general collapse of the will (abulia, paralysis) and sense of self. One
remark like this, properly considered, turns the Freudian perspective upside down. Behind the
paralysis, however lay the terror. The association of terror and Modernism derives from the reevaluation of the Greeks, the taste for Jacobean Tragedy, the rise of the Gothic, the influence of
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the hysteric Nietzsche and so on. As William J. Brazill puts it of late nineteenth-century German
artists: “‘The ‘Panic terror.’ They all experienced it: Rilke, Munch, Klee, Hofmannsthal,
Kokoschka, all.”(Chapple and Schulte, 1981, 529-30). William James wrote in the Varieties of
Religious Experience “The worst kind of melancholy is that which takes the form of panic fear.”
(Varieties, 156) Dramatic expressionism is the action of Munch’s scream. It was the failure of
the human creative will before the new conditions and the consequent terror that created the
great violent dissociations effected by the Master Myths of the twentieth century: Freud and his
libido and primitivism, which became a primary ideology of American capitalism; Stalinism;
Fascism.
Strindberg’s early naturalist dramas (The Father, 1887; Miss Julie, 1888)) had been
decisively influenced by the theories of hypnotic suggestion of Bernheim and the Nancy School.
His essays reveal his familiarity with the debate about hypnotic suggestion between Charcot and
Bernheim (Robinson, 1987, 25). Strindberg’s dream plays follow the psychotic episode he called
his “Inferno” period, during which he noted a passage about the treatment of the multiple
personality Ansel Bourne from William James’s Principles of Psychology. The phenomena of
multiple personality, Strindberg remarked, might explain “the strangeness of our existence, our
double life, obsessions, our nocturnal life, our bad conscience, our groundless fear, our
persecution mania, which is perhaps not a mania but we are persecuted.”(Meyer, 1985, 348)
Similarly the Preface to “Dream Play” refers to the multiple selves of the dreamer:
As in his previous dream play, To Damascus, the author has in A Dream Play attempted to reproduce the
detached and disunited—although apparently logical—form of dreams. Anything is apt to happen, anything
seems possible and probable. Time and space do not exist. On a flimsy foundation of actual happenings,
imagination spins and weaves in new patterns: an intermingling of remembrances, experiences, whims,
fancies, ideas, fantastic absurdities and improvisations, and original inventions of the mind. The
personalities split, take on a duality, multiply, vanish, intensify, diffuse and disperse, and are brought into
focus. There is, however, one single-minded consciousness that exercises dominance over the characters:
the dreamer’s.
Clearly Strindberg was theorizing within the culture of dissociation. He was, as well, the major
influence on both German and American dramatic Expressionism.
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Thus while it seems in the relatively stable pre-War conditions that one sees in the work
of Janet, Bergson, Proust, the Jameses, etc., the invention of “life,” as an enlarged and freer
consciousness, or presentiment, it is also possible to talk of a general culture of dissociation at
the end of the nineteenth-century, connected to artistic movements like Aestheticism, Symbolism
and the art of Decadence. Janet’s work stands out as the great definition of both an emergent
psychology of mental force and mental tension but also a whole phase of scientific and nonscientific inquiry into the strangeness, complexity and concealed aspects of the modern subject
and the effect of violent, overwhelming attacks on the self.
In late nineteenth-century fiction, after the brief interlude of Victorian high-realism, the
double reappeared in, for instance, Stevenson, Wilde and Conrad (see also Ellenberger, 1970,
162-3, 281-4). Doubles can also be found in the drama of Ibsen, Sorge, Hasenclever, Kaiser,
Toller, Glaspell, Lawson and Toomer, among others. Mesmerism and suggestion are subjects of
two other modern myths, that of the Vampire (Bram Stoker, Dracula, 1897) and Svengali (Du
Maurier, Trilby, 1894). But such elements made more subtle appearances, for instance in the
poetry and drama of the Symbolists. Arthur Symons’s influential study The Symbolist Movement
in Literature (1899) discusses Laforgue and others in terms of dedoublement, speaks of humans
as puppets or masks, and is fascinated by the mysticism of Maeterlinck’s strange dissociated
world (eg. Les Aveugles). The prose of Edouard Desjardins, author of Les Lauriers sont coupés
(1887), for instance, has a striking uncanny, “accompanied” feeling:
I’ll remember…You don’t believe I love you…I desired you madly…All right…
I give you back your body…
Up the dark street, the double row of gas lamps seeming smaller and smaller, no
passers-by in the street; the pavement resounding, pale under the pallor of the clear sky
and the moon…the houses ever the same; silent, tall, with high darkened windows and
doors with iron fastenings
The German author Hugo von Hoffmannsthal had read Janet (“Case histories by Janet supply
evidence that strength of faith decreases with decreasing will-power.— Here lies the root of
higher existence.” Book of Friends, compiled from notebooks, 1917-22, and published 1922.)
His remarkable The Letter of Lord Chandos (1902) reveals a mentality of supreme sensitivity. A
disgust with identity words like “spirit”, “soul” “body” is accompanied by an anguish that
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spreads like “corroding rust.” “For me everything disintegrated into parts.” Life becomes a cellar
full of writhing poisoned rats, the female as an “animal” baring its teeth “to its monstrous fate.”
Hoffmannsthal tells the story of the shamed Crasus, who fell in love with a fish. Manic ecstatic
episodes leading to “barely believable “vacuity” and “inner stagnation.” Finally, there is the
desire for a language the identity of dedoublement and the sense of the threat of a terrible
judgment: “because the language in which I might be able to not only to write but to think is
neither Latin nor English, neither Italian nor Spanish, but a language none of whose words is
known to me, a language in which only inanimate things speak to me and wherein I may one day
have to justify myself before an unknown judge” (1952, 134-41). This is the Janetian
subconscious.
Such examples allow us to go back to find the element of dedoublement in the great
classic stylists of Janet’s early period, Henry James and Marcel Proust. In James’s The Princess
Casamassima (1886), for instance, a good little woman takes the boy she has brought up to see
his dying mother, a murderess:
A moment later they found themselves in a vast interior dimness, while a grinding of keys and
bolts went on behind them. …She only had meanwhile a confused impression of being surrounded with
high black walls, whose inner face was more dreadful than the other, the one that overlooked the river; of
passing through grey stony courts, in some of which dreadful figures, in hideous brown misfitting uniforms
and perfect frights of hoods, were marching around in a circle; of squeezing up steep unlighted staircases at
the heels of a woman who had taken possession of her at a first stage …she pursued her tortuous way into
the circular shaft of cells where she had the opportunity of looking at captives through grated
peepholes…silent women, with fixed ideas…flattened themselves against the stone walls….a panic seized
her as she went, in regard to the child. On him to the horror of the scene would have fallen (Chapter 3)
And so on, to the hysteric guilty dying woman. It is difficult to believe such a passage is not
informed by Janetian psychology, perhaps even an acquaintance with the wards of the
Sâlpétriere. The effect, of course, is hugely heightened because of James’s displacement of point
of view from the boy to his guardian. He, to whom this is most personal and most traumatic, is
therefore what cannot be imagined. This dedoublement is matched by the series of women from
guardian through warders and prisoners to nightmare mother who together represent the collapse
of the “good enough” (Winnicott) maternal object. Lest this seemed too unlikely a passage to
represent James, I turned also to the first words of The Wings of the Dove (1902):
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She waited Kate Croy, for her father to come in, but he kept her unconscionably, and there were moments
at which she showed herself, in the glass over the mantel, a face positively pale with irritation that had
brought her to the point of going away without sight of him. It was at this point, however, that she
remained; changing her place, moving from the shabby sofa to the armchair upholstered in a glazed cloth
that gave at once—she had tried it—the sense of the slippery and the sticky.
As for Proust, one need turn only to the “Overture”:
Will it ultimately reach the clear surface of my consciousness, this memory, this old, dead moment
which the magnetism of an identical moment has traveled so far to importune, to disturb, to raise up from
the very depths of my being? I cannot tell. Now I feel nothing; it has stopped, has perhaps sunk back into
the darkness, form which who can say whether it will ever rise again? Ten times over I must essay the task
the task, must lean down over the abyss….
And suddenly the memory revealed itself….The sight of the little Madeleine had recalled nothing
to my mind before I tasted it….their image had dissociated itself from those Combray days to take its place
among others more recent, perhaps because of those memories, so long abandoned and put out of mind,
nothing now survived, everything was scattered…..But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists,
after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, taste and smell alone, more fragile but
more enduring, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, remain poised a long time, like souls,
remembering, waiting, hoping, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unflinchingly, in the tiny and almost
impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.
In fact, what Proust’s narrator constructs is what Freud would come to call a “screen memory”
(1899). For the great stage set of the past” that then rises, the world of Combray and M. Swann,
conceals the deep unease. That “little scallop of pastry, so richly sensuous under its severe,
religious folds,” does not, of course, evoke simply through a chain of senses, but as a sign. It
represents an idea of a forbidden love, and behind it little Proust’s fear of going to bed at night
without a kiss from his mother (a source of complete terror for him) and all that leads to and
means.
O’Neill was strongly influenced by Strindberg. T. S. Eliot read Symons’s Symbolist
Movement where he discovered his great model, Laforgue. Eliot himself, following Symons,
later discussed Laforgue in terms of dedoublement. We know that Joyce credited Desjardins as
the originator of the style of stream of consciousness or interior monologue. We know that Kafka
was deeply influenced by Hoffmansthal. We know of Henry James’s vast influence on the
techniques of the modernist poetry of Pound and Eliot. Thus the dissociationist culture of the late
nineteenth century was carried through into Modernism.
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The other major aspect of Janet’s influence was in what might be called the philosophical
argument of his psychiatry. In my book I have used the term “dissociationists” to describe both
psychological-psychiatric researchers (such as Théodore Flournoy and Morton Prince)
influenced by Janet and major philosophers such as James, his colleague Josiah Royce, and, of
course, Henri Bergson. (Janet’s later differences with Bergson are the subject of his study,
L’Evolution de la mémoire et de la notion du temps (1928).) I am pointing to the fact that
L’Automatisme psychologique is a work of both psychiatry and philosophy. In this respect, I
have been much influenced by the argument of Regine Plas and Jacqueline Carroy (2000, 23140) which places L’Automatisme in the context of debate between French philosophy, including
the work of Janet’s uncle, Paul Janet, and deterministic psychology. Janet, to adapt a famous
phrase, called the subconscious into existence. His study challenged two kinds of deterministic
materialism that, after the full publication of Eugene Azam’s research on the multiple Felida X
(Hypnotisme, double conscience et alteration de la personalité, 1887), had felt themselves
reinforced: biological determinism and associationism (compare Bergson’s critiques of the
latter). Both these determinisms were implicit in the British empirical school advocated by Ribot
and in the evolutionary mix of the day—the notable figure is Herbert Spencer.
In L’Automatisme psychologique (1889), Janet demonstrated that the mind could be an
object for rational inquiry and observation and was at the same time relatively free and
autonomous, not merely subject to the determinants of time/space or biology. That Man was not
an automaton was, in fact, disssociationism’s first statement: the first published works of James,
Morton Prince and Boris Sidis all addressed the problem of automatism. The consequence of this
argument was to acknowledge that a great deal of human behavior was not capable of those ideal
degrees of presentiment, mental tension and mental force that Janet’s psychology would soon
stress. In other words what might be called a free and active will was not available to many
people who, instead, lived in conditions of relative subconsciousness and automatism. “Free
will” and consciousness are cultural constructs. Surely this is one of the great challenging
sociological ideas of about the modern condition, echoed in a plenitude of books from Nathaniel
West to Marcusse and Vance Packard to Baudrillard.
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Here are three cases of Janet’s influence on the modernist thought of his time. In the first,
Janet’s erstwhile mentor, Ribot, impressed by evidence of intense traumatic memory retained
without diminution over long periods of time—i.e., that contradicted his own famous Law of
memory—was moved to write his, Diseases of Personality and Diseases of Memory, texts from
which Stanislavski developed his theory of “affective memory.” Similarly, Henri Bergson,
whatever Janet came to think about his work, found, as he states, a clear stimulus to the concept
of la duré in Janet’s discovery of the relevance of past to present ( Essai sur les données
immédiates de la conscience, 1889). Bergson proved important for Proust as well as making one
of the most influential descriptions of subjectivity in the Modernist period. Thirdly, William
James’s Principles of Psychology (1890) is primarily based on a series of articles he published in
the 1880s: 1872, 1874, 1879). Yet L’Automatisme psychologique, along with works by Alfred
Binet published in English in Chicago in 1889, less than a year before the Principles, play a large
and significant part in the final work. Janet allowed James to give a negative answer to the
question “Are we ever wholly unconscious?” James, in other words, used Janet to provide further
evidence against the argument for human automatism. As well, he used the evidence of fugues
and selective unconsciousness as part of the case against associationism, since such conditions
provide dramatic proof of the selectivity of consciousness just as the division of selves
emphasizes the internal relations and extensive dimensions of mind. James went on to wonder
“How far this splitting of the mind into separate unconsciousness may exist in each of us?” and
remark that the researches of Janet and Binet stood at “the beginning of an inquiry which is
destined to throw new light into the very abysses of our nature.”
In his famous Chapter 9, “The Stream of Thought,” James again cited cases of
dissociation at length. James version of a stream of consciousness with its halos and penumbras
(language which he and Virgina Woolf may have derived from Robert Louis Stevenson) is
beautiful and suggestive but not quite reconciled to the subconscious of dissociation that at the
same time clearly fascinated him. Indeed James could not reconcile his interest in the subliminal
unconscious and the subconscious of Janet, until, I think, in The Varieties of Religious
Experience, he brought them together in his figures of saintly pathology. The Varieties invented
and repeatedly exemplified the psychiatric breakdown as the Way of the Modernist Soul (whilst
remaining skeptical that all that was sought was ever achieved). James saw that pathology, such
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as develops from trauma, does bring grave questions, terrible insights, sharp perceptions into
horror and beauty, even creativity with it. His work provided one of the major bridges between
the case history and literature. Like James, Janet had also been interested in spiritism and was
later to study pathological religious belief at some length in his De l’angoise a la extase; études
sur les croyances et les sentiments (1926-8). Janet was more skeptical than James, yet in 1907
remarked in his Major Symptoms of Hysteria that “A hysterical person may be a saint; a
hysterical person may have lucidity: that is undeniable.” In this respect one must recall his
conclusion to his brief “Autobiography”: “As William James said, one sees what one is prepared
to see, so too, one cannot study the psychology of man without guiding ideas, without
philosophical or even religious interests.” (1930) At any rate, the figure of the pathological or
hysteric saint was to play a crucial role in T. S. Eliot’s poetry and, without the example of
James’s Varieties it is hard to imagine The Waste Land (passé Pound) in its final form. Much of
Eliot’s subsequent poetry and drama continues in this vein. That Stein’s writing owes something
to automatic writing and that her work, from the early Three Lives on, is rife with depictions of
dissociation is obvious enough. Her Four Saints. In Three Acts is also clearly indebted to James
and hence Janet. Generally James’s influence on Modernism was profound. Two of James’s
other pupils turned out to be the two great thinkers of the Harlem Renaissance, W. E. B. Du Bois
and Alain Locke. The former, in The Souls of Black Folk (1903), made the first, extraordinarily
influential account of the dissociation produced by racism.
As well, the philosophical aspect of dissociationism and the sense of multiplicity that
accompanied it facilitated James’s development of both his Pluralism and Pragmatism. In respect
of Pragmatism, James was closely associated with Charles Saunders Pearce. Pearce was the
inventor of Semiotics, and it seems doubtful that the perception of language as such, as it occurs
in Pearce, would have been possible without the dissociationist critique of association and
determinism. James came to see consciousness not as a thing but as a relation; Pearce saw that
the medium of that relation was language. Janet himself, in his later psychology, both
emphasized the vital importance the recognition of the part played by language in psychology
and studied the “evolution” of the mind before language. Whether there is a connection with the
work of Ferdinand de Saussure (Course in General Linguistics, 1916), I do not yet know.
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Though James did not invent the narrative style of “interior monologue” or “stream of
consciousness,” the widespread critical use of his term appropriately suggests he provided the
age’s best and most influential definition of this aspect of Modernism. Yet, fine as his writing is,
he did not provide examples of anything like the style that came to be described by that term.
Janet did:
Hystericals are not content to dream constantly at night; they dream all day long. …They carry on
in their heads an interminable story which unrolls before them or which is inwardly conceived….Bertha
make us constantly repeat to her what we have said, and , hover with her in the clouds. “Her eyes seem to
read a book but her face tells another story: “When I shall die, I shall have a small white bouquet on my
small tomb…How unhappy I am!...The idea is frightful but it lulls me, and I am ready to defend against it
who should want to take it away from me; let me think of my little tomb; it gives me so much pleasure….
Oh! That pink paper! I am going to make a dress for my doll; I used to take her with me always atraveling; Saint Cloud is not so nice as the seashore. Oh! That string there! Let me pull the mechanism;
how now, what have you in this bowl? It is my aunt: my, how ugly she is!... This lady looks as if she were
coming from confession. You know I never go there….How many flies here! They have large wings with
diamonds on them; oh! Maxime! He is as lively as a snail; look at his horns, etc. (201-2, 461)
Janet adds “This chatter lasts for hours; all this while she is not exactly without consciousness of
what she is doing.” He calls it “the telegraphic language of the maniacs of which MM. Falret and
Magnan speak.” (461) Telegraphese became the term for the verbal style of dramatic
expressionism. What Janet was illustrating, though in slightly parodic form, was the synthesis
William James did not quite arrive at: the dedoublement of the stream of consciousness, the
subconscious element that we have already seen present in late nineteenth-century fiction.
*
James Joyce, of course, did not adopt stream of consciousness till long after James’s
Principles had been published. His acknowledged source was Dujardins. His earliest work
practiced a disturbingly layered and suggestive minimalism. The first paragraph of the first story
in Dubliners (1914) contains the famous sentences:
Every night as I gazed up at the window I said softly to myself the word paralysis. It had always
sounded strangely in my ears, like the word gnomon in the Euclid and the word simony in the Catechism.
The boy narrator refers to the condition of a dying priest whom gossiping neighbors say had
dropped the chalice and been discovered in the confessional in feeble laughter. This has naturally
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been referred to Joyce’s own words about the theme of Dubliners being “paralysis.” Paralysis is
clearly very much a cultural metaphor, informed by Joyce’s views of the effects on Irish life of
“civilized morality,” the Catholic Church, British dominion and tedious or romantic nationalism.
Yet, though on another occasion he speculated with his brother that everyone in Dublin had
syphilitic paralysis, Joyce’s full sentence speaks of his intention to “betray the soul of that
hemiplegia or paralysis that many consider a city” (Letters, 1.55).
Paraplegia may be a physiological condition or a psychological condition typical of
hysteria. Hemiplegia is discussed in Janet’s Mental State of Hystericals and at length, with
accompanying illustrations, in The Major Symptoms of Hysteria (Lecture 7). In an early chapter
of Mental State, Janet writes of the paradoxical mobility of anaesthesias (including “genital
anaesthesia”) and the condition of “hemianesthesia.” Still under the heading of “Amnesias” he
noted of such cases
They live from day to day, scarcely able, as has been seen, quite to understand what is going on at the
present moment, and generally powerless when the remembrances of the past and the images of the future
come into question. (1901 [1977], 77)
Beyond Proust! How often such states of numbness or automatism are depicted in Modernism.
(And is this not the condition in which many people in the Third World move about in without
hope of alleviation?)
It is in his chapter on fixed ideas that Janet seems to be closest to the “The Sisters”. Such
conditions, Janet argues, originate “from an accident, from some emotion which can be clearly
represented in the mind.” This fixed idea “often asserts a permanent sway”; “there is, as it were,
an obstinacy in maintaining” paralytic symptoms. The idea is “subconscious” but when it arises
in dreams, in crises, or in somnambulisms, “we find again the initial terror” (351-3). “What is the
nature of these fixed ideas?” Janet asks: “M. Charcot has described the simplest and certainly
most frequent—the simple idea of numbness, of impotency, of paralysis” to which Janet adds,
“Every subconscious idea robs the principal personality of sensations and images” (354). Finally,
in the concluding chapters, Janet emphasizes an aspect of dedoublement. “Most attacks can be
14
interpreted as the reproduction, more or less complete, of an emotion, an action, an old idea in a
second existence.” (492)
The relevance of this to Dubliners seems substantial. Joyce’s statement that for his
paralyzed priest “it was the third stroke” can bear an interpretation in terms of betrayal. His
dropping of the chalice is an action that is evidently a repetition of some earlier action and/or
lack of action, a loss of belief and will, and perhaps some substitute perversity. Hence the
paralysis. But Janet’s words seem even more prescient in respect of Joyce’s fourth story, the
stunning “Eveline”. There is the abulia approaching paralysis: “Her head was leaned against the
window curtains and in her nostrils was the odor of dusty cretonne. She was tired.” The reverie,
shattered by the traumatic memory, is accompanied by sudden movement:
As she mused the pitiful vision of her mother’s life laid its spell on the very quick of her being—
that life of commonplace sacrifices closing in final craziness. She trembled as she heard again her mother’s
voice saying constantly wit foolish insistence:
“Derevaun Seraun! Derevaun Seraun!”*
She stood up in a sudden impulse of terror. Escape! She must escape!
[*Gaelic: “the end of pleasure is pain]
Joyce provides no account of the steps that take her to the crowded harbor: it is, in effect, a
fugue. There another terror intrudes: “Her hands clutched the iron in frenzy….She set her white
face to him, passive, like a helpless animal. Her eyes gave him no sign of love or farewell.” The
paralysis again. Janet had written of one of his amnesiacs: “A woman…might forget the name of
her husband and even forget her marriage…” (206).
There is a suggestion of sexual abuse in the boy’s dream in “The Sisters” which
concludes in oriental imagery: “I remember that I had noticed,” the boy recalls of his dream,
“that I had noticed long velvet curtains and a swinging lamp of antique fashions. I felt that I had
been very far away, in some land where the customs were strange—in Persia, I thought….” The
second story, “An Encounter,” deals overtly with the boy being approached by a pseudo-cultured
pederast and his flight to the security of the common masculine herd. The oriental metaphor is
carried on in the next story. The boy’s romantic feelings for a friend’s sister (“Her dress swung
15
as she moved her body and the soft rope of her hair tossed from side to side.”) collapse when he
fails to find the courage to buy her a present from a shop girl chatting with two young men at a
bazaar called “Araby”. It ends with the words: “Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a
creature driven and derided by vanity and my eyes burned with anguish and anger.” Much of the
remainder of Dubliners consists of tales of young men reduced to meanness and pettiness by
their world. Even “Two Gallants”, in which a man sleeps with a poor girl to get her to give him
money,” turns the sought-after money into both the image of both a betrayal and a fixed idea.
Shame becomes a major factor and remains so through to the concluding “The Dead”.
An interesting question about psychiatric terminology is raised by Joyce’s work.
Dubliners is a text that might be said to epitomize what Freud called repression, set in the capital
of a country in which repression is supposed to have been pretty much terminal. But is the
libido/repression model quite to the point? (If it was, Joyce might have made it a bit easier for us
to decide about whether Eveline should go with her lover.) “Repression”, as Joyce gives it, is
made up of the large and small traumas inflicted by a traumatizing system, a resultant tangled
layering of fixed ideas and dissociations. Similarly, in practice the state of “civilized morality”
Freudians referred to in terms of “repression” was largely made up of a combination of major
and minor maternal intrusions (often including enemas, hostility towards genitalia, attacks on
masturbation, etc.) backed up by brutal paternal interventions, and accusing religion. Such
trauma was accompanied by a whole discourse of minor and unconscious belittlements (repeated
woundings and shamings). Motives of sadism, deriving largely from the dissatisfactions of the
gender war (the double standard, and the accompanying aggressive assertion by women of the
somewhat self-defeating cults of motherhood and purity, in turn accompanied by crude male
revenges) are well evidenced (D’Emilio and Freedman, 1997; Grotstein and Rinsley, 1987). The
appropriate approach seems through Janet not Freud. The success of Freud’s idea of Oedipal
repression, then, owed much to a period in which mothers were unsatisfied and at home, father’s
remote, servants legitimate prey or vice versa (as in Joyce’s “The Boarding House” and
Strindberg’s plays) and long engagements frequent (breeding, at least, emotional incest).
Undoubtedly the subject of Janet and gender would repay attention, for a primary
preoccupation of Modernism is the condition of women. On the one hand, there is an almost
16
desperate feminism among women and a highly sympathetic feminism among many men. On the
other there is the male fear of women (well described by Karen Horney) and the widespread
hatred of the abusive and overbearing mother shared by both male and female writers. It is a fact
that Modernism all but uniformly rewrites Freud’s Oedipus (in which the mother is simply an
object of desire) into accounts of the mother’s formative influence, as in the Object Relations
psychology of Melanie Klein and her successors, who did much to preserve dissociationist
insights in the Freudian period (Klein, 1986; Fairbairn, 1952; D.W.Winnicott, 1989). As well,
dedoublement or multiplicity demonstrated that gender was often not singular. Hysteria was not
confined to women. Thus there is an increasing revision of gender and sexual identity (“I,
Tiresias, old man with wrinkled dugs”) in Modernism alongside the emergence of a feminine
écriture, that as the work of Bonnie Scott (1990) and others has shown, is shared alike by female
writers like Stein and male writers like Joyce. All this was facilitated by Janet’s work on multiple
personality along with his sympathetic attention to the female subconscious. Janet heard female
trauma.
Joyce’s style in Ulysees seemed, on its first publication, not a style of fragmentation to A. R.
Orage, editor of The New Age but “a theory of harmonics in English” which communicates “a
complex of qualities or ideas simultaneously instead of successively” thereby creating “a new
and complex knowledge of self”(28: 227). Contemporary critics have agreed. Joyce’s characters
have an extraordinarily lived presentness but he does not eliminate the pathological from his
characters’ streams of consciousness. In his various incarnations in Joyce’s writings, Stephen
gradually becomes freer of a kind of intellectual barrenness. In Ulysees, he has been again
condemned by his mother’s vampiric curse, with the whole Catholic Church behind it, into a
kind of rigid dissociation. Nor has he the will to quite reject the English oppressor as represented
by Haines. Bloom, the Ulysees, is impotent and his wife is having an affair. But Joyce also had
an almost unmatched sense of the richness of language and the intertextuality of stories. The epic
or mythic parallel does not become inflationary or stained-glass like as in Jung. It is the author’s
not the characters’. Eliot was to see the value of Joyce’s techniques in transforming dissociation
into literature. The trauma along with the richness of life resides in the depths of the word.
Ulysees is, finally, a tale of the recovery of will, restored mental tension and force, renewed
energy and sexuality, such as Janet, James (“The Energies of Man,” 1907) and Boris Sidis all
17
claimed as a new human possibility. Referring to James and drawing on Janet, Morton Prince
observed that while depressing thoughts tend to disintegrate “exalting” emotions and thoughts
tend to synthesize (1924, 546-8). In Psychological Healing, Janet quotes a patient (Irene) in her
own words:
It is strange how large everything is here; the furniture and the other objects in the room seem brighter, I
can feel my heart beating…. It is as if I have come out of a profound sleep, had recovered from a long
illness, as if I had been resurrected, as if a new life were opening before me. (1. 97)
Molly’s monologue ends with
I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked again would I yes to say yes…and first I put
my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his
heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes
Not the dissociating will of the Victorians. As well, the most hateful character in the Ulysees is
the nationalistic Citizen. In making the Jewish injured petit bourgeois Bloom his hero and his
chief accuser a rabid nationalist, Joyce, in anticipation, reproves the whole hideous history of the
nationalist idée fixe that was awaiting Europe. Joyce’s Irishness and his refuge in Switzerland
had largely protected him from the impact of World War I.
Other stream of consciousness writers are a little closer to that thin, anxious stream of
consciousness Janet illustrates although “reverberation” (the term Eliot uses at a crucial moment
in The Waste Land) is part of their art (in an essay, “On Memories Which Are Too Real,” Janet
remarks, “In my opinion the unreal character of these memories depends precisely on this
absence of reverberation or echo; on the suppression of all the processes which ordinarily
surround and complete our perceptions and reports.” (ed., Campbell, 1925, 145)). Katherine
Mansfield provides an example from fiction of the more hysteric “chattery” style of stream of
consciousness. In Mrs. Dalloway (1922), Virginia Woolf set up a complex doubling between
Clarissa and the shell-shocked soldier, but one which Clarissa finally escapes through a ground
of self in an early lesbian experience and the epiphany provided by an older single woman at a
window. Yet, in general the effect of Virgina Woolf’s lyricism depends upon its always
suggesting instability, abuse (she was sexually abused by her older step brothers (De Salvo,
1989) and dedoublement.
18
William Faulkner, whose relation to the War was remote if intense, nevertheless began
his fictional experimentation with the subject of “shell shock” in Soldier’s Pay, as did Dos
Passos in Three Soldiers and U. S. A and Hemingway in In Our Time and The Sun Also Rises.
Hemingway partly learnt his “dissociative” style from Stein. Faulkner, like Joyce, had the ability
to deal with extreme states of splitting, doubling and dissociation in a style as linguistically dense
and culturally grounded as Ulysses. His work has yet to be approached from the perspective of
dissociation: one wonders why? Consider this from the opening chapter of As I Lay Dying, in
which we feel the obsession, the fixed idea of this rigidity of rivalry that recalls both Janet and
Girard:
Jewel and I come up from the field, following the path in single file. Although I an fifteen
feet ahead of him, anyone watching us from the cottonhouse can see Jewel’s frayed and
broken straw hay a full head above my own. The path runs straight as a plumb-line, warn
smooth by feet and baked brick-hard by July, between the green rows of laid-by cotton,
to the cottonhouse in the center of the field, where it turns and softens the cottonhouse at
four soft right angles and goes on across the field again, worn so by feet in fading
precision.
The cottonhouse is of rough logs, from between which the chinking has long
fallen. Square, with a broken roof set at a single pitch, it leans in empty and shimmering
dilapidation in the sunlight, a single broad window in two opposite walls giving onto the
approaches of the path. When we reach I turn and follow the path which circles the
house. Jewel, fifteen feet behind me, looking straight ahead, steps in a single stride
through the window. Still staring straight ahead, his pale eyes like wood set into his
wooden face, he crosses the floor in four strides with the rigid gravity of a cigar store
Indian dressed in patched overalls and endued with life from the hips down, and steps in
a single stride through the opposite window and into the path again just as I come round
the corner. In a single and five feet apart and Jewel now in front, we go up the path
toward the foot of the bluff.
These are the sons of Addie, the mother who lies dying, before whose indifferent eyes they are
competing for recognition.
*
19
It was in Eliot’s Freshman year, 1906, that annus mirabilis of Harvard’s “own greatest period of
psychological and philosophical discovery” (Greaves in Kluft and Fine, ed., 357), that Janet delivered
his famous series of lectures on The Major Symptoms of Hysteria on the occasion of the opening of the
Harvard Medical School. More famously, Eliot came across Symons’s The Symbolist Movement in
December of 1908. Symons drew on French dissociationist psychology, notably Janet. Through Symons,
Eliot discovered Laforgue; he had ordered and received the Oeuvres completes by Spring, 1909. In his
later essay on Laforgue, Eliot echoed Symon’s language, referring to a “dedoublement of the personality
against which the subject struggles.” Again, in his essay on “Euripides and Professor Murray” (1920),
Eliot ironically, or glibly, summarized a course of modern thought: “we have watched the clinics of
Ribot and Janet, we have read the books from Vienna and heard a discourse of Bergson”. Was one of the
reasons for Eliot’s 1911-12 trip to France to get closer to Janet and the French school of psychiatrists?
Did he, in fact, “watch the clinics” of Ribot and Janet as he certainly attended Bergson’s lectures?
Bergson’s work, he later said, was his only experience of being humanly converted. Eliot found a mirror
and a basis for his poetry in the states of consciousness and subconsciousness described by Ribot, James
and Janet.
Janet and his school thus early provided Eliot with an advanced psychological view point
from which he could learn of the pathology (and yet fascination) of the hysteric/ multiple self.
Ribot and Janet discussed voices within and outside the mind, trance states, suggestibility,
numbness, abulia, and so on. Such a world seems to come alive in Eliot’s early poetry, which
depicts a world of disturbed vision and separation from life: “He finally remarked: ‘I feel/ As if I
had been a long time dead.’ (“The Little Passion”, 7-8); “The world of contact sprung up like a
blow’ (“Bacchus and Ariadne”, 9); I lie on the floor a bottle’s broken glass/To be swept away by
the housemaid’s crimson fist” (“Hidden under the heron’s wing,” 6-7).
I fumbled to the window to experience the world
And to hear my Madness singing, sitting on the kerbstone
(“Prufrock’s Perviglium”, 29-30)(ed. Ricks, 1996)
“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” Eliot’s first major poem, is particularly indebted to Les
Obsessions et la psychasthenie (2 volumes, 1903). With that work and Les Névroses (1909), Janet had
20
apparently turned his attention away from dissociation to the subject of “psychasthenia.” Though the
term psychasthenia preceded Janet, Janet made it into the alternative to the meaningless but popular
“neurasthenia.” According to Janet, the psychasthenic was one who displayed an unusual lack of a sense
of reality and general feelings of “incompleteness” and powerlessness (the concept of abulia is again
particularly relevant to this category). Janet argued the distinction between the psychasthenic and the
hysteric: the hysteric was unaware of split-off material, the neurasthenic aware, but powerless. Yet as
Stephen Braude remarks “there are widely recognized forms of dissociation in which the states in
question are not hidden from conscious awareness.” (Braude, 122). Indeed, as Roger Pitman points out,
in Janet’s account, “The patient experiences an obsession as having an invasive quality, arising outside
his will.”(Pitman, 294) Even Freud had remarked in a paper of 1894 that a large class of obsessions
“might be called traumatic” (“Screen Memories,” 1899). Janet, though he argued otherwise, was still
studying dissociation and trauma. In turning his attention to psychasthenia then, Janet had, in fact,
broadened his recognition of dissociation.
Les obsessions completes Janet’s portrait of the consequences of trauma, for the real
significance of Les obsessions lies in its perception of the widespread employment of dissociative
defenses outside of classic hysteria. He describes the experience of vague, general anguish
(“l’angoisse diffuse”), comprehensive remorse (“le remords general portant sur tous les actes de
la vie presque sans exception”) and obsessive self-loathing and shame (“l’obsession de la honte
de soi”). Janet recognizes both spiritual (“It’s his spirit, his will, his intelligence”; “c’est son
esprit, sa volonté, son intelligence”) and physical shame (“le sujet est mécontent de son corps”).
In this respect, he continues a lifelong discussion of anorexia. Janet also describes and discusses
de-personalization, the sense of unreality, estrangement and the conscious experience of
dédoublement (“To replace this self he appeared as another”). He describes the feelings of selfestrangement (“Le sentiment d’étrangeté du moi”), the experience of doubleness (“le sentiment
de dédoublement”) and complete depersonalization (“le sentiment de dépersonnalisation
complete”). Aboulie leads to the experience of conscious somnambulism including the feelings
of being machine-like (“la sentiment d’automisme”); of non-being (“je n’arrive pas à l’être”); of
having lost consciousness of the self (“’J’ai perdu toute conscience de mon être’”); of being
elsewhere (“‘je vis dans un autre monde’”). “At bottom, it was if she was dead.” (“Au fond c’est
21
comme si elle etait morte”): the living death of dissociation. (1903, 1.1, 21, 22-3, 373, 2, 33-50,
313, 305-19, 345, 43, 38, 41, 81 )
After France, Eliot had returned to Harvard for graduate studies, during which time he read
and annotated works by Janet and James, as well as with Morton Prince’s The Dissociation of
Personality, along with studies of the lives of saints and comparative mythology. The effect of
what I have called philosophical dissociation can be seen from Eliot’s dissertation on the English
Hegelian, A. C. Bradley. Siggs quotes this passage from Eliot’s study as evidence of its
difficulty:
A point of view…need not be considered as identical with one human consciousness; so that we
may be said to move from one point to another when we determine an object by another relation. If this be
true, then the movement between one “finite centre” and another will not differ in kind from that inside of
one consciousness, and will consist in the constitution of a real world by ideal references of many aspects.
The difficulty is much reduced if one is aware of James and Janet.
Eliot’s criticism is largely organized around the complexities of dissociation. There is
influential (though often superficially understood) idea of “the dissociation of sensibility.” The
phrase is taken from Levy-Bruhl but is informed by Eliot’s familiarity with psychological
dissociation (“Massinger,”1920; “The Metaphysical Poets,” 1921). Similarly, Eliot’s
extraordinary essay, “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919), is soaked in the dissociationist
perspective. Eliot says of the poet that “through the most individual part of his work…his
ancestors…assert their immortality” (there is an anthropological element to this). The poet
sacrifices his personality to make himself a medium. Eliot refers the term medium to the catalyst
of chemical compounds, but the more compelling suggestion is that “medium” means something
like the mediums that James and others investigated (verbal suggestion by Geoffrey Hartman).
22
The poet must be “a more finely perfected medium in which special, or very varied, feelings are
at liberty to enter into new combinations”. A longer passage strives to explain:
The point of view which I am struggling to attack is perhaps related to the substantial unity of the soul: for
my meaning is, the poet has, not a “personality” to express, but a particular medium, which is only a
medium and not a personality, in which impressions and expressions combine in peculiar and unexpected
ways” (Selected Essays 14, 19-20)
Compare this to Janet’s account of the suggestibility of the hysteric in his Harvard lectures:
There is no effort on the work of the subject, no addition of strength from his anterior tendencies, no work
of his personality. On the contrary, he does not seem to realize the development of what takes place within
him….In order that there may be suggestion, it is precisely necessary that all these normal causes of
development should be wanting, and that the idea should seem to develop to the extreme, without any
participation of the will or the personal consciousness of the subject. (1907)
Eliot is not identifying the poet as a hysteric; somehow, he turns the “depersonalized” to a
positive: he is seeing the hysteric and the poet he was in the light of multiple personality.
Eliot was a significant expressionist dramatist as well as a great poet and his love of the theater
clearly owes something to his sense of the multiple self. “Sweeney Agonistes” makes brilliant use of
states of dissociation described by Janet and Binet. After one of Eliot’s great one-liners, “But I’ve gotta
use words when I talk to you,” there are repetitions of simple words --“dead, “alive”—that achieve a
trance like, hypnotic effect. This is like a darker version of the Riddoz method (see below). It leads to
the haunted marriage and the terrible experience of guilt and unreality. Sweeney struggles to express that
loneliness and then, on a rising note, gives up, leaving it to the chorus and the drums to chant and beat
out the conclusion, the fear and the horror of the failure of love and the dissociated life: “And perhaps
you’re alive / And perhaps you’re dead”. One recalls Ribot’s examples of extreme dissociation—the
man who thought he slept with his own dead body, the voice out of nowhere in the darkened room. The
ghosts and the monkeys are going “Hoo, Hoo, Hoo” (meaning, in part, “who, who, who” and “you, you,
you”) as the knocking on the door intensifies. Something wants to come in, and we are way beyond
suppressed wishes. Eliot’s later play The Family Reunion (1939), which he saw as picking up from
“Sweeney Agonistes”, provides perhaps the most conscious account of traumatic dissociation in
Modernist drama. In The Three Voices of Poetry (1954), Eliot remarked that “I doubt whether in any
23
real poem only one voice is audible” and quoted from Dickens’s The Pickwick Papers the passage
“…the voices wos very loud, sir, and forced themselves upon my ear”… “Well, Mrs Cluppins…you
were not listening, but you heard the voices.” (1954, 37)
It is, of course, impossible to deal with Eliot’s epic of trauma and dissociation, The Waste
Land (1922) (with its original title, also from Dickens, “He do the polis in different voices”) in
the confined space of an article. The calamity of the War, the haunting of the war dead, the
battlefield itself, are felt everywhere in a poem that tells of a fragmented, Balkanized Europe and
European Mind. The dominant term is “Unreal” as it is in Les Obsessions. Eliot employs
numerous voices, many of them hysteric (“Summer surprised us…”) or numb (“I could not…I
was neither…I knew nothing”), figures that are as flat and yet suggestive as Tarot cards, whose
emergence can only be explained by the congruity of estranged city and dissociated mind on
which so much Modernism is built. His ambiguous, ironic tone is itself a vehicle of
dedoublement. Terror and horror creep through the poem. Gradually a story of sexual trauma
emerges (one which the manuscript reveals to be based on that of Eliot and his first wife, Vivien,
both then in the throes of nervous breakdown after the collapse of their marriage). Misogyny
gives way to intimations of rape, the doubly-gendered compassion of Tiresias:
She smooths her hair with automatic hand,
And puts a record on the gramophone
and pity
“On Margate Sands,
I can connect
Nothing with nothing.
The broken fingernails of dirty hands.
My people humble who expect
Nothing.”
la la
with ensuing hope.
24
The poem’s concluding section, rapidly written at the clinic of the Swiss therapist Roger
Vittoz, draws on Vittoz’s practice of guided imagery (the repetition of the word “water”). (Janet
wrote in praise of this therapist in Psychological Healing, though Vittoz’s own writing is
simplistic and reductive in the extreme.) There is doubling, even tripling (“Who is the third who
walks always beside you?”) in the fifth section, images of scapegoating (empire, the terrifying
mob, crucifixion, apocalypse); and in the manuscript, especially, imagery of childhood trauma.
Language as much as God speaks the way forward, though the poem finally rests where it says it
does, with a diminuendo of fragments shored up against “ruin”. It appears that the term
“fragments,” with its echo of shell shock, does not appear in psychiatric usage before Eliot.
*
The double may seem, and perhaps partly is, a crude or folkloristic way to represent
dedoublement. But the double, as René Girard suggests, also represents an intensification and
crisis of inner or outer relations into rivalry, often with an aspect of murder-suicide, as in the
relations between Morton Prince’s Christine and Sally Beauchamp. In part reflecting
Dostoevsky’s influence (Dodd, 1992), doubling, as Kurt J. Fickert has argued in his book
Kafka’s Doubles (1979), is basic to Kafka’s art. But Fickert and other Kafka critics who make
the same emphasis do not make the connection with dissociative dedoublement.
The famous story “Metamorphosis” reminds us both of the imagery of the reduced self of
abuse and every squalid teenage boy’s life. This strange mixture of horror and elation is a
remarkable comment on the disordered family, and it does not do to forget that Kafka’s father
was an expert tormentor, nor that the Kafka’s were Jewish—the cockroaches of Europe (Kafka
uses the metaphor this way himself), and Jewish Germans in Czech Prague. That Janet and
James were known to Prague culture is evident from the studies and writings of the Căpek
brothers. Freudians, of course, have discovered the Oedipal in Kafka. True, Kafka’s protagonists
dream of the woman in a fox fur, as they scuttle along labyrinths; true that they are perpetually
under the judgment of the Father. But this is precisely because they have been vehemently driven
out of the identity of the son, as in the strange early tale of doubling and suicide under the
revealed violent power of the Father, “The Struggle”. It seems that what is imaged in the
frequent attacks from the rear in Kafka, is not a latent homosexuality (and who would care
25
anyway?) but a fear of demasculinization, perhaps by penetration—the sense of a vulnerability
that cannot be guarded against. At the same time the insect-son seeks a role as the family
supporter and martyr, a role in guilt, sacrifice (he is the willing scapegoat) and magic power, for
it is only when he has achieved his own revelation of disgustingness and exile from the family
that the sexual life of his parents is restored. This is why Kafka is so deeply moving—his stories
are tales of love and the desire for love, but love shamed and humiliated because it knows it is
despised and knows too that it is ultimately driven not by love but terror and shame. Kafka’s
protagonist is a creature that would feel bliss in suffering for its guilt and yet lives in horror of its
punishment; one that’s identity, especially its flesh, is the hostile judgment of the Father (“The
Penal Colony”). Kafka’s heroes are understandably loathsome and irritating, prickly, encased in
something that oozes, like Gregor.
Kafka’s best-known novels, The Trial (1925) and The Castle (1926), are supreme studies,
following on from Dickens and Dostoevsky, of the new faceless bureaucracies and the resultant
manias and idée fixes, the paranoia, the inexplicable feelings of guilt, the sense that one has been
unfairly singled out or judged or is going to be in some court somewhere, in some elsewhere
where one is already tortured, or even dead: terror represented in dissociation, as predictive of
the century to come as Joyce or Eliot. Another striking work of this kind is “The Burrow”, which
with its attempt to build a system of such complex withdrawal that it can be penetrated and
attacked by any terrible and nameless horror provides one of the most compelling literary images
of the endless task of traumatic dissociation.
*
Let us turn from horror. Two such enthusiastic Parisians as Gertrude Stein and her friend
Picasso must have known of Janet’s ideas and the work of his colleagues. Stein, of course, had
studied psychology under James and other Harvard Professors. James’s chapter on space in the
Principles of Psychology was a subject of discussion among the Cubists. The young, hypermasculine, sexually-insecure Picasso clearly found a kind of companionship and repose with
Stein, who was, at the time, becoming increasingly sexual without being sexually threatening to
the male, but who was, in her female massiveness and apparent masculinity, a kind of challenge.
26
It was Picasso’s appreciation of these qualities that produced one of the first great paintings on
the road to Cubism, his famous “Portrait of Gertrude Stein”. She allowed him to forget the
beautiful and its opposite and simply to work on her presence. Stein sits as massive and dumb as
a rock or an ancient enigmatic sculpture: the sage as idiot.
There is a strength of meeting the subject in the Stein portrait that is simply not present in
Picasso’s fauve, blue or pink periods, with their characteristic male disgust and wistfulness (the
harlequin) before the female. Prostitutes were a favorite subject of bohemian artists in those days
and Picasso is no exception. In poetry, similarly (notably in early Eliot), encounters with
prostitutes are a favorite subject, but the tone is often one of fear, dread or impotence. Brothel
scenes are also common in Expressionist drama. Since brothels displayed women like goods, the
natural assumption would be that the male gaze is in control. After all, this was the age of the
protest against White Slavery in America, and melodramatic as many of the tracts of the time
were, they undoubtedly portray a reality of widespread brutal exploitation of women. But
brothels were also often the scenes of the brutal initiation of many boys into sex by brothers,
friends, relatives, even fathers. The boy who entered the reception room was confronted by the
collective, heavily made-up, gaze of often older women. The experience could be terrifying,
even traumatizing, especially as the older prostitute often suggested the mother. In Picasso’s
fauve period, prostitutes’ eyes command, glowing out of sinister, leering and grotesque
expressions. In the blue and pink period the slim, limp young artiste is usually married to some
skinny haggard girl of the streets with whom he shares a sort of sentimental entrapment. The
blue period, particularly, captures the sense of pondering the limits of possible embodiment in
such an environment. The breakthrough painting was of course Les Desmoiselles D’Avignon, the
sketches for which reveal that the original subject was a brothel scene. In the final painting the
male clients are reduced to a drowning hand holding on the spectacle-making curtain. The
pattern of scimitar curves suggests the potential for castration. Yet the paintings greatness lies
exactly in its ability to confront the male fear of women and make a tribute to female strength,
strangeness and energy. A few other paintings of rather terrifying savage women followed, but
clearly Picasso had now arrived at his shaping strength. To my knowledge he never painted a
prostitute again. This is not to say that Cubism is not a painterly development, or that it is all
27
about trauma, though the great Guernica (1937) was not the only time Picasso was to again turn
Cubism towards the representation of traumatic dissociation.
It must be said, however, that unlike an increasing contemporary literature, Modernism
could explore trauma without really being able to name it. I mean by this not only that
Freudianism suppressed trauma but that Janet himself—with his typical description of the
stigmata of dissociative states as due to hereditary degeneration or even the failure of will—
never quite focused trauma as we have today. Consider this from a Janet essay of the same year
as Guernica, 1937: “Is it not true that the original incident of the traumatic reminiscence was
emotionally disturbing for the very reason that the subject was already in an abnormal condition
because of other influences,” and even, “These patients are first and foremost social weaklings”
(1937, 101, 85). Of course Janet’s client population included cases of schizophrenia, bi-polarity
and persons whose depression was so acute that we would not now treat it without medication.
Yet nineteen thirty-seven is a bad year to be talking about “social weaklings.”
If Janetian psychiatry at least partly opened up the nightmare world, then Janet’s
psychiatry as a therapeutic enterprise, his psychology, and his contribution to dissociationist
philosophy opened up rich possibilities for the modernist creation of a rich alive and related
subjectivity—a subject that goes far beyond what has even been suggested here. For I believe
that I have only touched on a few features of Janet’s influence on his age. His apparent turn from
dissociationist psychiatry after 1926 may well have been simply motivated by the hostile
reception of the Catholic Church, though it seems also that he had resigned himself to the
temporary ascendance in psychiatry of Freud. But the elements of his psychology had long been
in place. Though we can speak of Janet’s emphasis on conduct or action it is a great mistake to
see him as essentially a behaviorist (“behavior” is a much more restricted term than the French
conduit). Similarly, the lucidity and grasp of the fundamentals of life saved him from the relative
mistiness of James or the idealism and intuitionism of Bergson. Just as he had stepped back form
the enthusiastic spiritists who admired his work in the 1880s, Janet was now intent on escaping
more sophisticated species of idealism. Janet’s psychology stresses movement, energies (mental
force and tension) and relation to world. A long section of the essay “Psychological Strengths
and Weaknesses in Human Behavior” (1937, 64-105; 98-105) provides a clear revision of his
28
earlier work on trauma, preferring a therapeutic emphasis on addressing of “asthenia” in terms of
behavior rather than the recall of memory. This debate is present today in the deliberations of the
International Society for the Study of Dissociation. Perhaps Janet gave away too much. What this
reader is struck by in such a late essay is not only the capacity for a broader psychology but also
a sociology of pathology.
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