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Study of cases of anterograde amnesia in a disease of mental disintegration

Serge Nicolas

Laboratoire de Psychologie Expérimentale, CNRS UMR 8581, Université René Descartes (Paris V), or EPHE, 71 avenue Edouard Vaillant, 92774 Boulogne-Billancourt Cedex, France

Amandine Penel

Haskins Laboratories, New Haven, CT, USA

Pierre Janet, in his famous paper (1892) on anterograde amnesia, is concerned with the theme of the disintegration of the human personality. He shows that the weakened personality may lose the power to assimilate memories of current events. After a severe shock, there may supervene not only a retrograde amnesia (a blotting out from memory of some period before the accident), but also a continued or anterograde amnesia, that is to say, an inability to remember events occurring after the accident. Janet details the circumstances of a very interesting case of amnesia resulting from an attack of hysteria, brought on by the shock of bad news. The patient, 'Mrs. D.', had wholly lost all memory of events that occurred during the month and a half before her attack, and since that time she had only been able to remember for a few moments what was going on around her. Janet shows that memories which appear not to be formed are in fact formed; that they exist somewhere in the patient's mind with the full vividness of ordinary recollections, and that they may spontaneously crop up in dreams, or may be called out by hypnotic suggestion, or by other methods.

History of Psychiatry, Vol. 12, No. 48, 481-485 (2001)
DOI: 10.1177/0957154X0101204806


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