Pierre Janet’s current concepts in
Cognitive Behavioural Therapies
Gerhard HEIM
Reprinted from :
HEIM, G. Pierre Janet’s current
concepts in Cognitive Behavioural Therapies
(2006). Janetian Studies, Actes des conf. du 27 mai 2006, No Spécial 01, pp. 9-14.
1. Cognition, behaviour,
psychotherapy
If a cognitive behavioural therapist should want to learn
about the psychotherapy of Pierre Janet , one would recommend the following
studies :
1st regarding the psychology of neuroses : “Les
Obsessions et la psychasthénie” (1903)
2nd relative to therapy:
“La médecine psychologique” (1923) or the chapter on treatment by
excitation ( les traitements par l’excitation) in the third volume of “les
médications psychologiques” (1919).
3rd concerning theory: his lessons
on “La force et la faiblesse psychologique”(1932) and his contribution in the Encyclopédie
Francaise entitled “ La
psychologie de la conduite” (1938).
These studies cover 35
years, but it should be added that from his beginnings Janet has given philosophical and methodological arguments
for what is called today the
cognitive behavioural approach in
pathological psychology and psychological therapy.
Brooks (1998) has discussed the role of the “eclectic legacy” in French psychology (Ribot,
Janet) and sociology (Espinas, Durkheim). He
states that Janet, like Ribot , was a monist,
who saw mind and motion as two
aspects of the same reality, to be
studied by the methods of natural science. But, in contrast to Ribot “Janet
refused to invoke physiology to
explain psychological phenomena” (p.180)
, because this would be” premature” and
“metaphysical”. Janet would have also argued “on methodological grounds that
any act that normally requires conscious thought must be assumed to contain
conscious elements, even if the subject is not aware of them.”(p.181). Thus he
extended consciousness beyond habit and
instinct to include even the regulation of the body’s physiological functioning.
These views could qualify
Janet as an early representant of the modern cognitive
paradigm, introduced during the Sixties of the last century in psychiatry,
psychology and psychotherapy. Bolton
(2004) has recently argued that this paradigm sucessfully
replaced the solution for the problem
of the subjective as well as objective
nature of psychological phenonomena offered by
Karl Jaspers, who proposed in his “Allgemeine Psychopathologie” from 1913 complementary methodologies
for Understanding the subjective and Explanation of the
objective. Now, in
the cognitive paradigm meaning could
have a causal function and may be
combined with, but not reduced to
biological research. This perspective is found today in “translational
research” in psychiatry (e.g. Bohus & Schmahl 2006) or within the framework of “biocultural co – constructivism” in lifespan psychology (Baltes et al. 2006) .
Of importance, too, is Janet’s view of hypothesis as “ un procédé par lequel l’esprit humain dépasse l’observation sensible et ajoute aux
faits connus par les sens quelque
notion qui n’est pas actuellement
sensible et qui peut-être ne le sera jamais.” (1907, p.227).
[ “a procedure by means of
which the human mind goes beyond sensory observation and adds to the facts known by the
senses some notion that cannot
actually be sensed and
which perhaps never will be.”]. Moreover, as experimentalist, Janet
followed Claude Bernard’s opinion, that without hypothesis one would only
accumulate sterile observations.
The link of Janet’s
psychological conception
with behaviourism probably was
recognized early because of his own remarks
about the objective psychology of action, but
obviously it was
not taken very seriously. The French historians Carroy and Plas (2000) doubted
whether Janet succeded in detaching his
objective psychology from its speculative and idealistic origins. They consider that
even his attempt to place behaviour at the center of psychology
was based on the a priori - postulate that he would include higher,
conscious processes in his study of human behaviour. Accordingly, Carroy
and Plas argued that Janet cannot qualify as a
behaviourist even today. However, one can only agree with this conclusion if
one adopts a narrow definition of behaviourism.
A classical behaviourist , such
as learning theorist Edwin R. Guthrie (1938) evidently saw this
differently : after he has visited
Janet’s lessons at the Collège de France
in winter 1923 , he not only translated
one of his books into English,
but combined in his clinical psychology textbook (1938) “Janet’s
descriptive psychology and current physiological notions of the sources of
action” and “added an objective theory of learning.” (p.ix).
In a recent study on the history of behaviourism
between 1890 and 1990 Leary (2004) uses the role of consciousness and social-cognitive processes in
empirical psychology to
point to the variety of approaches since the days of James , Baldwin, Angell, Dewey and Mead until the works of Watson, Tolman,
Hull and Skinner. In particular Tolman’s careful and metaphorical conceptualizations and
his undogmatic methodology of purposive behaviourism
which places mental processes at the center of
research, possibly reveal the closest relationship to Janet’s approach. For instance, compare Tolman’s
(1927) attempt to define consciousness
in behavioristic terms: “Wherever an organism at a given moment
of stimulation shifts then and there from being ready to respond in some
relatively less differentiated
way to being ready to respond
in some relatively more differentiated way , there is
consciousness.” ( p.64) with Janet’s (1929): „La conscience, c’est
précisément ce que nous ajoutons de
nous-mêmes pour ordonner nos actions, pour réorganiser tout l’organisme qui a été dérangé par une action provoquée
par le monde extérieur. » (p.88)
[“Consciousness is precisely what we add of ourselves in order to command our
actions, to reorganize the whole organism who has been
disturbed by an action elicited by the external world.”]
Janet’s significance for
modern Cognitive
Behaviour Therapies (CBT) is
indicated by his definition of
psychotherapy: “Psychotherapy is an application of psychological science to the
treatment of disease.” (1925, p. 1208). Already in 1907,
in his resumé of his lessons at the Collège de France
entitled “Psychological
Analysis and the critics of psychotherapeutic methods” Janet
made the
following
remarkable
statement: « Enfin les éducations de l’attention , les
traitements de l’émotivité, les diverses
excitations qui se proposent de relever
le niveau mental , constituent des
méthodes qui sont encore
employées un peu au hasard, mais
qui joueront un rôle de plus en
plus grande dans l’éducation et dans le
traitement de l’esprit. » (p.71)
[“Finally the education of attention, the treatment of emotionality , the
various excitations which intend to raise the mental niveau, form methods which are already applied a bit by chance, but which will play a more and
more important role in education and treatment of the mind.”]
2. Janet’s self-regulatory
resource allocation model
Janet’s blueprint of the
working of the mind contains several key concepts which seem relevant for CBT :
Force
can be understood as referring to available processing resources which have to
be mobilized and distributed among processing components according to the given
situational demands, executed by a hypothesized supervisory and regulatory
function. This allocation policy
corresponds to tension. Tendencies (tendances),
hereditary or acquired, can be viewed as molar behavioural units, which in
their stage of latency belong to procedural (implicit) longterm
- memory systems (as opposed to declarative or explicit memory storage). To become activated tendencies pass
through different stages (erection,
desire, performance), by this making
it possible to describe symptoms as errors, failures or insufficient
actions. Of particular interest
is Janet’s view of feelings
(sentiments) as regulations of
action and because of that
they can be related
to motivation and learning:
effort ( referring to
controlled processes) , fatigue
( habituation, or reactive inhibition ) , angoisse ( avoidance), triomphe
( intrinsic reinforcement / self-reinforcement).
The features of Janets model are
: action oriented ; dynamic
(that is referring to continuous change of action in time); general
as well as differential ; consistent
wit neurobiological models of
behavioural-emotional regulation , in particular regarding the prefrontal –
limbic systems .
Janet’s model seems to belong to a group of behavioural
models which have in common the idea of dynamic self-regulation. In
cognitive psychology , for example
Schneider and Shiffrin (1984) , Kahneman and Treisman
(1984), Norman & Shallice (1986) , Simon (1994),
or in personality psychology Kuhl (1998) have summarized many relevant
contributions during the last
decades.
3. Janet’s concepts in
modern cognitive behavioural therapies
Janet’s model relies on the
idea of self-regulation or attentional and volitional
processes. Its emphasis
on the role of cognitive -verbal
processes in understanding and
treating psychological disorders anticipates
recent developments in cognitive and behavioural therapies (cf. Heim
& Bühler,
2003; Heim & Bühler, in press).
In the Seventies for example
Albert Bandura’s (1977) self efficacy model or
Frederick Kanfer’s (1991) self- management
approach have introduced the cognitive paradigm in behaviour therapy.
In this respect it is worth
noting the current shift from the rationalistic and somewhat static information
processing models of that time to constructivist, dynamic conceptions
(e.g. Meichenbaum & Fitzpatrick 1993). Although
these newer approaches, except
the one I discuss below usually do not refer to Janet directly , or mention him only
in passing, the compatibility
with his approach is astonishing. I will give a few examples:
1. The General
Psychotherapy approach by the late Klaus Grawe
(1995) founds on a classification of
therapeutic interventions according to the type of problem and the state of the
individual to be treated. This
differential and integrative
model was clearly antedated by
Janet (1919; 1923) who has discussed
and grouped the various methods
of psychotherapy with respect to the
intended goal.
2. Janet’s resource
allocation model fits well into the framework of CBT
for depression. More specifically,in Mindfulness -
Based Cognitive Therapy, Segal,
Williams and Teasdale (2002) propose that for the prevention of recurrent major depression , train
patients to disengage from their
habitual ruminative processing mode and shift to an intentional processing mode in which automatic negative thoughts and feelings are viewed as mental events rather than identified with the self. Explained in Janet’s terms, this treatment
aims to replace automatic affirmative beliefs with reflective beliefs by
raising mental tension.
3. With respect to posttraumatic
stress disorder the model of
Ehlers and Clark (2000) resembles
Janet’s views
in several ways:
First during the traumatic
experience, data-driven processing is more dominant than conceptual processing.
This, in turn favors
pathogenic associative learning processes and prevents a synthetic processing of
the trauma. This idea corresponds to Janet’s “lowering of the mental niveau”
.
Second,
reexperiencing of the trauma caused by involuntary
(automatic) mechanisms while intentional or voluntary recall is blocked, is understood as a consequence of deficient
inhibitory processes in autobiographic memory. In Janet’s terms, the traumatic
memories return because they are disintegrated or dissociated fixed ideas that
are evoked by stimulation.
Third the therapeutic approach is an attempt to improve synthetic processing just as Janet proposed when he wrote:
“Les meilleurs procédés sont ceux qui déterminent l’assimilation de l’événement
émotionnant, qui amènent le sujet à comprendre
par a réflexion, à y réagir correctement, à s’y résigner. » (1923, p.101)
[“The best methods are those that cause the assimilation of the
arousing event that bring the subject
to comprehend it by reflection, to react against it correctly and to resign himself to it.”].
Recently, Fiedler (2006) has discussed Janet’s ideas on dissociation and
trauma in a broader cognitive behavioural
context as well as in contrast to psychoanalytic conceptions.
4. Explicit
links between Janet’s studies and cognitive behavioural therapies are
underscored by the work of Nicolas Hoffmann in
Conclusion
It is true, that Janet’s contributions were
rarely acknowledged, especially not in the field of CBT,
who have many more or less unknown masters. But it is not my intention to
complain about that shortcoming or to demand a priority for Janet’s therapeutic
approach, or even to establish a Janetian therapy.
This in fact would make no real sense and would contradict even Janet’s opinion
about the scientific process.
Instead, the German Pierre
Janet Gesellschaft attempts to promote a new or even
first reception of Janet’s inimitable science-practionner
discourse. This refers primarily to his clinical case descriptions as well as pathopsychological
conceptions and could help the therapist to understand the holistic perspective for cognitive behavioural
psychotherapy as a continuously changing field with preliminary concepts without walking right into the traps
of neurobiological reductionism, adherence to technocratic or scholastic
attitudes, or pseudophilosophical and esoterical loans. Moreover,
Janet’s resource allocation
model, used as metamodel , that is
as a heuristic and
organizing principle in individual therapy is a
valuable tool for clinical processing and decision making.
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