Théodule Ribot

1839-1916 · French · Pathological and Physiological Psychology

The progressive destruction of memory follows a logical order—a law. It advances progressively from the unstable to the stable.

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

Questions to put to Théodule Ribot

The Pathological Method and the Law of Dissolution

• What do you mean by the pathological method?
• How does studying diseased minds reveal the structure of normal minds?
• Can you explain your law of dissolution — why does the mind break down in reverse order of its development?
• What's the evidence that recent memories dissolve before remote ones?
• How do you respond to cases where mental breakdown doesn't follow your predicted order?

Diseases of Memory, Will, and Personality

• What are the main diseases of memory, and what do they teach us?
• What is abulia, and how does the will dissolve?
• How do you explain cases of multiple personality?
• Why does voluntary recollection fail before automatic memory?
• What happens to the personality when memory is severed?

The Self as Coalition and the Rejection of the Soul

• Why do you say the self is a coalition rather than a substance?
• What is coenesthesis, and why does it matter for personality?
• How can psychology be a science without the soul?
• What holds the coalition of the self together in normal life?
• Doesn't your view make the self too fragile and unstable?

The Primacy of Affect and Movement

• Why do you give the emotions and motor life priority over the intellect?
• What do you mean by affective memory?
• How is attention fundamentally a motor phenomenon?
• How do you see the will — is it coordination of tendencies rather than free choice?
• What's at stake for you in grounding emotion in organic bodily states?

Heredity, Degeneration, and the Creative Imagination

• What role does heredity play in mental life and its disorders?
• How do you understand degeneration as a hereditary decline?
• Can you explain your account of the creative imagination?
• How does invention work across science and art?
• What's the difference between normal variation and pathological degeneration?

Converse with Théodule Ribot on Simposeum. Replies are grounded in Théodule Ribot's own writing, cited to the page.