Théodule-Armand Ribot

French psychologist (1839–1916), the man who separated psychology from philosophy in France and gave it a programme, a journal and a chair. He began as a philosopher at the École normale supérieure, but his two early surveys — La psychologie anglaise contemporaine (1870) and La psychologie allemande contemporaine (1879) — introduced French readers to Spencer, Bain and the associationists on one side and to Fechner, Wundt and the laboratories on the other, and argued that psychology should proceed as a natural science, without metaphysics and without the soul.

He founded the Revue philosophique in 1876, held the first French chair of experimental psychology at the Sorbonne in 1885 and moved to the Collège de France in 1888. His own method was pathological rather than experimental: illness, he held, is the experiment that nature performs on the mind, dissolving its functions in an orderly sequence that reveals how they were built. From that idea came the trilogy that made his name — Les maladies de la mémoire (1881), Les maladies de la volonté (1883), Les maladies de la personnalité (1885) — and Ribot's law, still cited, which holds that dissolution runs from the recent to the old, from the complex to the simple, from the voluntary to the automatic, so that a failing memory loses last week before it loses childhood.

His later works, above all La psychologie des sentiments (1896) and Essai sur l'imagination créatrice (1900), turned to affect and to invention, fields the laboratories of his day had left aside, and it was in the first of these that he named anhedonia, the inability to feel pleasure. Janet, Binet and Dumas were his students or his heirs, and French psychology for two generations was built inside the frame he set.