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

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