Théodule Ribot

1839-1916 · French · Pathological and Physiological Psychology

The dissolution of the mind follows, in inverse order, the course of its development.

Théodule Ribot was the founder of scientific psychology in France — the organizer who severed the study of mind from philosophy and metaphysics and re-founded it as a natural science, physiological in its method and empirical in its evidence. Through his surveys of *English Psychology* (1870) and *German Psychology of To-day* (1879) he brought the experimental and associationist traditions of Bain, Spencer, and Wundt to a French audience; through the journal and the chairs he established at the Sorbonne and the Collège de France he built the institutions of the discipline; and through his own…

Topics Théodule Ribot addresses

• the pathological method
• the law of regression
• dissolution
• Ribot's Law
• diseases of memory
• diseases of the will
• diseases of personality
• the self as a coalition
• coenesthesis
• psychology without a soul
• affective memory
• the psychology of the emotions
• the motor theory of attention
• abulia
• the primacy of the affective life
• the reality function of mind
• heredity
• degeneration
• the creative imagination
• French scientific psychology
• the will as coordination and inhibition
• the substantial soul rejected
• the narrowing of consciousness in disease
• psychology as a natural science

Converse with Théodule Ribot on Symposium. Every reply is grounded in Théodule Ribot's own writing and cites the page it came from. The corpus is public-domain text.