Pierre Janet's Addition to Charles-Hubert-Antoine Despine's “Old but Very Curious” Estelle L'Hardy Monograph

ABSTRACT

In the magisterial book The Discovery of the Unconscious, Ellenberger (1970) showed a keen appreciation for practitioners of many schools of therapy, including those who practiced animal magnetism (hypnotism). He credited Despine and Janet for their contributions to dynamic psychiatry and documented Janet's intellectual debt to Despine's successful magnetic treatment of 11-year-old Estelle's hysteria (dissociative disorder). No scholarship, however, has identified Janet's unique addition to Despine's 1838/1839 monograph—written decades before Janet's birth. Supplementing Despine's account of Estelle's minor fall that precipitated her paralysis, Janet reported that Estelle disobeyed her mother by quarreling with a friend, soiled her frock, experienced fright and shame, and sought to conceal everything from her mother. The author argues (a) that Despine knew yet wisely excluded Janet's data lest Estelle's family prevent his publishing the case; (b) that Janet's published data about the youngster's fall reached him through a professional network; and (c) that Janet's plausible addition comports well with his theoretical psychology of action—used in this article to explain the fine-grained parsing of Estelle's inner processes during the milliseconds of her fall: her vehement affect substituted for adaptive behavior. This article deepens the understanding of the Despine–Janet connection; maintains that Janet's addition deserves a place in the tradition of the medical case report; encourages trauma specialists to become familiar with their pioneers; and highlights the clinical continuity from Janet's affirmation of Despine's pioneering treatment strategies with the chronically traumatized to contemporary treatment for the same population, conceptualized along Janetian lines.

KEYWORDS:

• Pierre Janet
• Henri Ellenberger
• Charles-Hubert-Antoine Despine
• Estelle L'Hardy
• trauma
• hysteria
• dissociation
• dissociative disorders
• vehement affect
• magnetism/mesmerism
• hypnosis
• psychology of action
• history of medicine

Without Joanne McKeown and Catherine Fine's translation in preparation of Despine's French monograph, this communication could not have even been conceived. The author also indebted to Richard Kluft and to Onno van der Hart for reading an early version of this paper and for their judicious recommendations; to Stephen Ferguson, curator of rare books at Princeton University Library, who consulted on the publishing history of the monograph; to the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine for a copy of the elusive 1838/1839 first issue of Despine's monograph; and to Robin Thomas, former secretary in the English Department, for her patient accuracy in routine tasks and for her wide-ranging expertise in challenging tasks.

Notes

1. The title of the first issue was Observations in clinical medicine made at the baths of Aix in Savoie and the reissue, A study of the uses of animal magnetism and mineral waters in the treatment of disorders of the nervous system followed by a case of a highly unusual cure of neuropathy.