Henri Wallon

Henri Wallon (Paris, 1879 – Paris, 1962) was a French psychologist trained in philosophy and medicine, whose work focused on the psychological development of the child and on education. A convinced Marxist, he combined two careers, one scientific and one political, and his thinking sits at the meeting point of developmental psychology, psychoanalysis and dialectical philosophy. His contribution remains important for understanding how personality takes shape.

He studied at the École Normale Supérieure and qualified in philosophy in 1902. He then trained in medicine and became a doctor in 1908, working for several years with intellectually disabled children. During the First World War he served as an army medical officer and developed an interest in neurology. Later he held senior academic posts, including a chair at the Collège de France and a directorship of studies at the École Pratique des Hautes Études. His doctoral thesis, on the turbulent child, dates from 1925. In 1948 he founded the journal Enfance. He also took an active part in public life: he joined the Communist Party in 1942, was named Secretary of National Education in 1944 and chaired the commission behind the Langevin-Wallon reform project.

At the heart of his theory is the idea that personality develops not in a smooth line but through a succession of stages in which affectivity and intelligence take turns in leading. Wallon described an impulsive and emotional stage in the first year, a sensorimotor and projective stage up to about three, a personalism stage up to about six, a categorial stage during schooling, and adolescence. To explain this process he stressed emotion, the other person, the environment and movement, and argued that consciousness is built socially out of an early affective symbiosis. He therefore rejected the split between biology and society and held that psychology must be at once a natural and a human science. His best-known works include The Origins of Character in the Child and The Origins of Thought in the Child.

His influence reached developmental psychology and psychoanalysis in France and abroad. Lacan borrowed and adapted his notion of the mirror stage, and his ideas were discussed alongside those of Piaget and Vygotsky. Yet his work circulated less widely, partly because those rival theories dominated and partly because of his political commitments.