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The quarrel between Freud and Janet is well known in the history of psychoanalysis. In France, the adversaries of psychoanalysis have often used it because Janet carefully recorded those occasions when he judged that Freud had used his (Janet's) ideas.
Claude M. Prévost, who wrote a paper on Pierre Janet's 'psychophilosophy', recounts quite accurately the circumstances that brought Janet into opposition with the founder of psychoanalysis. Freud arrived at the Salpêtrière in 1885, and in 1889 attended the International Congress of Hypnotism and the Congress of Physiological Psychology. Janet was one of the organizers of the former while the latter was chaired by Charcot. In a 1961 paper, Chertok speculates that Janet and Freud could have heard a communication by Bourru and Burrot on the cathartic treatment of traumatic memories.1 However, their meeting at this time would acquire significance only through the reconstruction and interpretation of what was later to become rivalry and conflict between the two men.
Janet's L'Automatisme Psychologique had been published in 1889, before Breuer sent the story of Anna O to Freud. In this work, Freud may have read Janet's conception of the dynamic unconscious: the importance of unconscious motives in understanding the effects of post-hypnotic suggestion. However, Freud realized in addition that the effects of this suggestion could be understood only in terms of the factors that resist it.
Janet never recognized the importance of unconscious conflict, the foundation on which psychoanalysis was built, but he claimed priority for his description of the dynamic unconscious, a claim which Freud did not dispute. Janet also claimed priority for his descriptions of the curative effects of the evocation of traumatic memories. If this debt is to be measured in the context of French thinking on psychopathology, Freud owed more to Janet than he did to Charcot. On the other hand, Freud's publications in Vienna did not escape