ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an account of Sigmund Freud’s subjective view on Pierre Janet, and Janet’s subjective view on Freud. Janet’s works would never have had the implications which have made psychoanalysis of importance to the mental sciences and have made it attract such universal interest. Freud sought to emancipate his theory from Janet’s, and for that reason he abandoned Josef Breuer. Biological degeneration was a popular notion in the neurology and psychiatry of the nineteenth century. Diagnoses based on degeneration were a convenient method of explaining away the widely perceived and criticized failure of psychiatry to ‘cure’ very many of its patients. In 1906, Freud mentioned again the problem of degeneration, and also the name of Janet resurfaced. In 1887 Freud started his private practice, and as early as 1888, though still identified with the hereditarism of Jean-Martin Charcot, he underlined that hysterics retain “complete intellectual clarity and a capacity even for unusual achievements”.
