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In this paper John Haule traces and compares the influence of early French psychologists on the development of psychoanalysis and analytical psychology, re-examines Jung's dissent from the doctrine of incest, and concludes that Freud's true adversary was never Jung or Adler, but Janet.
Haule begins by referring to the works of early philosophers on the association of ideas, and the studies of Frédéric Paulhan on hysteria, hypnosis, the occult and multiple personality. He then introduces the movement known as ‘dissociationism’, which accepted that ideas and images combine into complexes each having its own personality. In the various types of somnambulism these complexes exist within one psyche, dissociated from one another.
Haule describes several patients from the early publications of Pierre Janet which led to the establishment of the idée fixe, a dissociated reminiscence of a traumatic event, as the key to hysteria. Janet developed the notion that the fixed idea results from a constitutional mental weakness which develops into a neurosis only when the individual experiences exhaustion or abaissement du niveau mental, which leads to a weakening of mental synthesis, essentially conscious ego integrity. This results in complete dissociation of functions in hysteria only. Other neuroses express the weakening of mental synthesis differently' but characteristically.
For Janet and dissociationism, psychic dissociation was not necessarily equated with pathology, and multiple personalities, for example, were seen as exaggerations of the normal.
Haule suggests that dissociationism was then eclipsed by the theories of Freud, who deviated from Janet in equating dissociation with pathology, and believed that the content of the fixed idea was a manifest compromise hiding a latent truth pertaining to an anomaly in the development of infantile sexuality. Using a familiar style of exploiting similarities and differences, Haule contrasts Freud's casual, temporal, covert schema with t