Pierre Janet on post-traumatic stress

Abstract

One hundred years ago, in 1889, Pierre Janet published L'Automatisme Psychologique, his first work to deal with how the mind processes traumatic experiences. Janet claimed that vehement emotions interfere with proper appraisal and appropriate action. Failure to confront the experience fully leads to dissociation of the traumatic memories and their return as fragmentary reliving experiences: feeling states, somatic sensations, visual images, and behavioral reenactments. A century later, Janet still provides an unsurpassed framework for integrating current knowledge about the psychodynamic, cognitive, and biological effects of human traumatization.

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