Abstract
IN his reasearches into human problems in industry, Prof Elton Mayo has been considerably influenced by the work of Pierre Janet, the French psychologist. Janet's findings have been less well known in the English-speaking countries than on the Continent, since few of his important works have been translated into English. To help those who wish to read Janet in the original French as an aid to their studies of society or of industry, Mayo has brought together some notes which were orignally prepared for his colleagues at the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration whose work demanded close attention to the difficult individual, social and administrative problems of our time. For many years Janet's clinical contributions to psychopathology have been dismissed somewhat cavalierly as something which has been superseded by Freudian and other developments. Readers of these notes will find that there is little real conflict between the observations of Janet and Freud, and that Janet's. investigations into the restricted field of obsessive thinking are in many ways mutually complementary to Freud's more widely ranging hypotheses. The book, written with Mayo's usual enthusiasm and sincerity, also includes his address to the Harvard Medical School on "Frightened People", in which he describes the causes of fear in individuals and the need for effective re-assurance in the consulting room.
Some Notes on the Psychology of Pierre Janet
By Elton Mayo. Pp. ix+32. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press; London: Oxford University Press, 1948.) 4s. net.
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H., T. Some Notes on the Psychology of Pierre Janet. Nature 163, 467 (1949). https://doi.org/10.1038/163467c0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/163467c0