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This paper describes the founding of the Revue Philosophique de la France et de l 'Étranger by Théodule Ribot (1830--1916) in 1876. Like the English journal Mind, which was launched the same year, this journal introduced the new scientific psychology to France. Its founding increased Ribot's scientific credibility in psychology and led him to be regarded as the most distinguished French specialist in the field. First, we review the state of French philosophy at the time of the journal's founding, focusing on the three main French schools of thought in philosophy and on their relations with psychology. Second, after analyzing the preface written by Ribot in the first issue of the Revue Philosophique, we examine how the journal was received in French philosophical circles. Finally, we discuss its subsequent history, highlighting its founder's promotion of new ideas in psychology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines some of the debates over maternal instinct in France under the Third Republic. It focuses on the work of three naturalists (Fabre, Perrier, and Giard) and shows how these scientists shaped, reinforced, or challenged feminine identities as well as a number of sexual social conventions making constant reference to the natural as their authority. This paper highlights these scientists' views on womanhood and maternity and their stances on contemporary feminist discourses as well as seeking to establish the extent to which these views and stances influenced their scientific discourses and practices. It also aims to demonstrate the interpenetration of science and policy, not only in terms of the transfer of political concepts into the scientific domain (and back again), but also as a joint construction process, which produced a new political and natural order in nineteenth century France. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In line with the growing concern with the unexamined reliance upon the concept of “experience” in anthropology, this article explores in some detail the various usages and definitions of the concept in the work of three of early French anthropology's most influential theorists: Émile Durkheim (1858–1918), Lucien Lévy-Bruhl (1857–1939), and Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908–). With its important influence on both British and American anthropology, the early French anthropological tradition, as epitomized in the writings of these three thinkers, has indeed played a pivotal role in shaping many current taken-for-granted understandings of the concept of experience in the discipline of anthropology as a whole. In the process of exploring how experience is viewed by these three scholars, this paper will thus take some initial steps toward the historical contextualization of many of the unquestioned assumptions underpinning current understandings of experience in the discipline of anthropology and the social sciences more generally. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes the context in which the teaching of psychology as an autonomous discipline was introduced in France, and reproduces the first psychology lecture given in France by Théodule Ribot on 9 April 1888 at The Collège de France. In France, this recognition was delayed because of the negative influence of spiritualist philosophy. It took both the acknowledged status of a man (Ribot) and a minister's decision for this new type of teaching to be accepted in France. After describing the events that took place at the Collège de France and at the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences, we reproduce in full Ribot's inaugural lecture at the Collège, an important document for the history of French psychology. We conclude by describing the circumstances in which this teaching came to its end in 1901. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to traditional French historiography, French scientific psychology was born when it differentiated itself from philosophy. This split between the two disciplines is attributed to Taine and Ribot, who, consequently, are considered to be the “founding fathers” of French psychology. In this paper we shall examine the case of Pierre Janet, who, at the turn of the century, was recognized worldwide as the most important French psychologist. It is generally said that he was the follower of Ribot and of Charcot. However, he was also Paul Janet's nephew. Paul Janet was a very well known and influential philosopher of the so-called French “spiritualistic” school, for which psychology was central to philosophy. In 1889, Pierre Janet published his doctoral dissertation, L'Automatisme psychologique, which was immediately considered to be a classic in psychology. We shall argue that this book is as much indebted to the old spiritualistic psychology, which claimed the substantial unity of the self, as to the new psychology at the time, which questioned it. With Pierre Janet, the split between psychology and philosophy in France was reconsidered. It would be more accurate to speak in terms of a compromise between philosophy and the “new” physiological and pathological psychology. © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examines sociologist Emile Durkheim's views on the sexual education of French teenagers, while focusing on his work `The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life.' Analysis of Durkheim's comments on sex education; Controversy surrounding sex education; Durkheim's debate with Jacques-Amedee Doleris; Details on Doleris' paper on sex education.

In 1880s France, hypnotism enjoyed unique medico-scientific legitimacy. This was in striking contrast to preceding decades when its precursor, magnétisme animal, was rejected by the medical/academic establishment as a disreputable, supernaturally tinged practice. Did the legitimation of hypnotism result from researchers repudiating any reference to the wondrous? Or did strands of magnetic thinking persist? This article interrogates the relations among hypnotism, magnétisme, and the domain of the wondrous through close analysis of scientific texts on hypnotism. In question is the notion that somnambulist subjects possessed hyperacute senses, enabling them to perceive usually imperceptible signs, and thus inadvertently to denature researchers' experiments (a phenomenon known as unconscious suggestion). The article explores researchers' uncritical and unanimous acceptance of these ideas, arguing that they originate in a holdover from magnétisme. This complicates our understanding of the continuities and discontinuities between science and a precursor 'pseudo-science,' and, more narrowly, of the notorious Salpêtrière-Nancy 'battle' over hypnotism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the years which followed World War I, psychologists of the Sorbonne organized “ control experiments ” to question the reality of parapsychological phenomena. They worked with well-known mediums and the results of their investigations were published in widely-read. French and American newspaper. Despite the melodramatic and somewhat humorous character of these episodes, the researchers involved were engaged in efforts toward genuinely scientific psychology. Henri Pieron and Henri Laugier, both positivists and militant rationalist, were leaders in the institutionalized development of psychology in France. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Positivism is a subject about which much is said, yet little understood. Of central importance for the history of the social and behavioral sciences, Positivism appears in widely various guises; as logical positivism of the Vienna School, as a sort of anti-theoretical empiricism against which many theoreticians have railed, and as a doctrine of faith for the regeneration of a broken society. Concentrating on the latter, the author inquires into the development of Positivism in nineteenth­century France in the writings of Saintshy;Simon, Comte, and Durkheim, all of whom emphasized the role of faith in determining certainty, or, at the very least, in keeping doubt at bay. The thinking of these French Positivists is then linked with the pragmatism of William James. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduces a series of articles published in the October 1996 issue of the "Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences." Interpretation of Durkheimian sociology in the historical context of philosophical currents; Discovery of the historical antecedents for Durkheim's social realism in the political and educational philosophy of Rousseau; Significance of the history of philosophy in France in understanding the intellectual and practical goals of sociologists.

Attachment theory, developed by child psychiatrist John Bowlby, is considered a major theory in developmental psychology. Attachment theory can be seen as resulting from Bowlby's personal experiences, his psychoanalytic education, his subsequent study of ethology, and societal developments during the 1930s and 1940s. One of those developments was the outbreak of World War II and its effects on children's psychological wellbeing. In 1950, Bowlby was appointed WHO consultant to study the needs of children who were orphaned or separated from their families for other reasons and needed care in foster homes or institutions. The resulting report is generally considered a landmark publication in psychology, although it subsequently met with methodological criticism. In this paper, by reconstructing Bowlby's visit to several European countries, on the basis of notebooks and letters, the authors shed light on the background of this report and the way Bowlby used or neglected the findings he gathered., (© 2019 The Authors. Journal of The History of the Behavioral Sciences published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc.)

To date, historians of psychology have largely ignored the role of academic publishing and the editorial policies of the late nineteenth century. This paper analyzes the role played by academic publishing in the history of psychology in the specific case of France, a country that provides a very interesting and unique model. Up until the middle of the 1890s, there was no collection specifically dedicated to psychology. Alfred Binet was the first to found, in 1897, a collection of works specifically dedicated to scientific psychology. He chose to work with Reinwald-Schleicher. However, Binet was soon confronted with (1) competition from other French publishing houses, and (2) Schleicher's management and editorial problems that were to sound the death knell for Binet's emerging editorial ambitions. The intention of this paper is to encourage the efforts of the pioneers of modern psychology to have their work published and disseminated., (© 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.)

This paper examines the metaphor of "suggestion" with reference to its origins and construction in the late nineteenth century in France. In addition to some general properties of the metaphorical mode, specific features of the "suggestion" metaphor are identified. It is shown how a network of meanings from a pathological situation (hypnosis) came to be applied to the behavior of crowds. The work of Le Bon was central in this process. This examination shows how metaphorical discourse was an important indicator of the orientation of early social psychology, namely the focus on interpersonal influence.

This paper discusses the influence of Jean-Martin Charcot's views on Sigmund Freud's early theory of hysteria and the notion of psychical trauma. We consider the early history of both psychical trauma and male hysteria, for in Charcot's view traumatic hysteria and male hysteria are identical. Freud's two 1886 lectures on male hysteria, delivered after his return from Paris, are crucial to the subject because they present Freud's first impressions of Charcot and his teaching. Some of the ideas presented in the two lectures foreshadow Freud's later generalization of the etiological role of trauma and his theory of the role of psychical trauma in the genesis of hysteria; that is, each hysterical symptom is due to a psychical trauma reviving an earlier traumatic event--the so-called principle of deferred action (Nachträglichkeit). Several arguments substantiate the thesis that Freud's notion of psychical (sexual) trauma was developed in reference to Charcot's notion of traumatic hysteria, and that the early psychoanalytic theory of psychical trauma is clearly indebted to Freud's encounter with Charcot's male traumatic hysterical patients. The discussed Freudian development points out the major role of (physical) traumata in eliciting psychopathological pictures and in this way is of definite historical relevance for the present-day discussion on the traumatic nature of the so-called multiple personality syndrome and other dissociative disorders, and post-traumatic stress disorders.