Awakening Sensibility, Recovering Motility. Psycho-Physical Synthesis at the Foundations of Body-Psychotherapy: the 100-Year Legacy of Pierre Janet (1859-1947)

Abstract

Pierre Janet founded psychological analysis over 100 years ago, and Freud's psychoanalysis grew out of this. Janet inspired many key concepts in individual psychology and in analytical psychology, as both Adler and Jung have acknowledged. More importantly, Janet was the first body-psychotherapist and a predecessor of Wilhelm Reich. Janet understood the relationship between breathing and emotionality and, together with Charles Richet (who had inspired Charcot's studies in hysteria in the decades before Freud), he carried out the most detailed investigations of respiratory patterns in neurosis. Janet worked with massage and with the re-education of movement. He understood that psychological analysis was a psycho-physical process, and that analysis needed to be followed by synthesis of the neurotic patient's previously fragmented and dissociated states. Janet's vast work has been relatively neglected until it was rediscovered by modern research into post-traumatic stress syndrome, where his insights are seen to be of crucial importance.

Keywords:
Synthesis; Vasomotor neurosis; Visceral consciousness; Body scheme; Diaphragmatic block; Biosynthesis; Contact channels.