ABSTRACT
Marcelle will be remembered as Pierre Janet's foremost case with ‘an essential characteristic of hysteria, the absence of will’ (Janet, 1901, p. 88). We are interested in her because she was a ‘voice hearer’ and because Janet used her case to formulate the concept of ‘verbal hallucinations’. He used this term as a more accurate name for ‘hearing voices’ (Janet, 1891). His early work, Automatisme psychologique, was published in 1889 when he was only 30 years old. It contains a brief account of hallucinations and other ‘impulsions’ in a chapter on dissociation (désaggrégation), but Marcelle herself is not mentioned. Our chapter is based on Janet's references to her in three of his works: a two-part article in Revue Philosophique in 1891, ‘Études sur un cas d'aboulie et d'idées fixes’, and two books: The Mental State of Hystericals published in 1892 and Pychological Healing published in French in 1919 and translated into English in 1925 (Janet, 1919). This means that even though the case we present here of Marcelle is detailed, it is without a doubt not based on everything that Janet ever wrote about her. Moreover, even though both Mental State of Hystericals and Psychological Healing recapitulate, sometimes verbatim, what Janet wrote about Marcelle previously, the settings change as do Janet's ideas about hallucinations. The second limit of this chapter is that we shall not provide an explicit account of how Janet's views of hallucinations and their context developed over time, even though that would certainly be an interesting project.
