Wallon, Henri

Born Mar. 15, 1879, in Paris; died there Dec. 1, 1962. French psychologist and public figure. Member of the French Communist Party since 1942. Participant in the Resistance movement.

Wallon was a specialist in children’s and genetic psychology; he also worked in the field of pathological and applied psychology. He founded the first laboratory in France for children’s psychology (1927) and the first journal in this field, Enfance (1948). On the basis of Wallon’s works on the genesis and stage by stage development of the child’s consciousness—both normal and pathological—and on character, emotions, and postural functions in children, a school of psychology that bears his name was founded. Basing his approach on the philosophy of dialectical materialism, Wallon rejected both physiologism and abstract sociologism in psychology and applied the principle of historicism to the analysis of the psyche.