Édouard Claparède

Édouard Claparède

Édouard Claparède (born March 24, 1873 in Geneva ; † September 29, 1940 ibid) was a Swiss psychologist and educator who founded the École de Psychologie et des Sciences de l'Éducation at the University of Geneva .

Life

Claparède, who had been critical of his college education as early as 1892, studied in Geneva and, for a short time, in Leipzig . He completed his medical degree in 1897 and then spent a year in Paris , where he made the acquaintance of Alfred Binet . From 1899 he worked for his uncle Théodore Flournoy . He initially researched topics such as sleep , wakefulness, and fatigue and quickly expanded his research beyond the field of physiology to the psychological functions associated with these phenomena. Childhood was another central theme for Claparède. Claparède became famous for his theory of becoming conscious: actions penetrate consciousness when they are not automated. He introduced the concept of psycholoexy (all qualitative psychological processes) as a counterposition to quantitatively oriented psychometrics .

In 1898 he wrote an - unpublished - treatise on the conditions of public opinion. This was the subject that occupied him all his life. But he was also particularly interested in child and animal psychology ; since 1911 he advocated the theory of functionalism . In 1912 he founded his educational science institute at the University of Geneva ( Institut Jean-Jacques Rousseau ). In the same year he wrote down for the first time observations that he had made on Karl Krall's horses in Elberfeld . At that time he was still convinced of Krall's assumption that animals could think and communicate in human language. A few years later he experienced setbacks in his own experiments with the Elberfeld horses, but he always defended Krall against his critics.

Claparède was friends with Jean Piaget (1896–1980), who came to Geneva in 1929 and, after Claparède's death, took over his chair and director of the JJ Rousseau Institute from 1940.

Fonts

In 1905 his work Psychologie de l'enfant et pédagogie expérimentale appeared , which he later revised under the aspect of functionalism, in 1931 Éducation fonctionelle and 1940 Morale et politique . In total he wrote over 600 writings between 1892 and 1940. Posthumously was designed by Pierre Bovet his autobiography published, Développement mental contained. In 1901 he founded the Archives de psychologie together with Flournoy . In 1920 he took care of the first translation of the five lectures on psychology by Sigmund Freud by Yves Le Lay into French and wrote the introduction to them.

Others

Claparède saw himself in the tradition of Jean Jacques Rousseau . In the 1950s and 1960s, many of Claparède's approaches became educational commons. Today some of them are being questioned again.

From 1932 to 1940 he was secretary of a seven-member international executive committee that organized the international congresses for psychology .

On the occasion of Claparède's 100th birthday, a memorial day was held in Geneva on November 16, 1973. This commemoration day was accompanied by two exhibitions in the Maison des Petits and in the Palais Wilson in Geneva.

Web links

• Fernando Vidal: Claparède, Edouard. In: Historical Lexicon of Switzerland .
• Literature by and about Édouard Claparède in the catalog of the German National Library

Individual evidence

1. ↑ http://www.jstor.org/pss/3443000
2. ↑ Herman H. Spitz, nonconscious Movements , Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Inc. 1997, ISBN 978-0-8058-2564-0 , page 36 f.
3. ↑ http://www.ibe.unesco.org/publications/ThinkersPdf/claparee.pdf