Janet, Pierre

Other dissociations are the altered states of consciousness seen in hypnosis and hysteria that have been likened to sleepwalking. The word somnambulism denotes not only sleepwalking per se, it also denotes those hypnotic trance states that impose a kind of sleepiness on susceptible subjects during waking. For Pierre Janet (and for Charcot, Freud, and the rest), this was the very essence of dissociation. The psychoanalytic model ascribed the same repressed libidinal wishes to the hypnotic somnambulist that it found to be the root cause of all dreaming. The fact of the matter is that any coordinated behavior is likely to invite the ascription of motive. If the subject is unconscious or nonconscious, then the motive must be unconscious too. 

JEAN-PIERRE JOST (345), Friedrich Miescher Institut, CH-4002 Basel, Switzerland JANET E. JOY (281), Laboratory of Biochemical Genetics, National Institute of Mental Health, Neuroscience Center at Saint Elizabeths, Washington, D.C. 20032 YASUFUMI KANEDA (50), Institute for Molecular and Cellular Biology, Osaka University, Suita City, Osaka 565, Japan... 

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