Claparède, Édouard

WORKS BY CLAPARÈDE

Édouard Claparède (1873–1940), Swiss psychologist, was born in Geneva. His choice of a career was decisively influenced by his cousin, Theodore Flournoy, also a psychologist, and his uncle, Édouard Claparède, a zoologist. After attending secondary school in Geneva, Claparède studied medicine in Leipzig and Geneva, concluding these studies with a thesis entitled Du sens musculaire à propos de quelques cas d’hémiataxie posthémiplégique (1897). He spent a year in Paris, where he worked with Joseph Déjerine in neurology and became acquainted with Alfred Binet.

Returning to Geneva, where he remained for the rest of his life, Claparède worked in Flournoy’s psychological laboratory and as Privatdozent began giving a course on sensation. At the same time, he continued his work in neurology and became interested in animal psychology. Karl Groos’s book, The Play of Animals, had a decisive influence on Claparede at that time, orienting him toward a functional point of view. In 1901, together with Flournoy, he founded the Archives de psychologie, of which he had charge until his death.

Claparède, in his book L’association des idées (1903), was one of the first to show the shortcomings of the associationism then dominant in the world of psychology. Two or three years before H. J. Watt and N. Ach wrote about the role of instructions and determining tendencies, Claparède realized that the problem of association cannot be solved without taking into account the entire set of attitudes of the subject to whom the inducing word is presented. This led him to consider the functional question of the value of an association for the subject’s immediate situation or of the significance to the subject of the goal that may be attained by an association. He concluded that an “autonomous mechanism of the association of ideas” operates only in the case of fortuitous or purely mechanical associations; associations with relevance for the subject’s situation are determined by the interest or meaning aroused by a particular connection and, hence, by an impelling quality that cannot be explained by association per se. [SeeGestalt theory.]

Next, Claparède published his theory of sleep (1905a), the origin of which he described with some humor. In the course of an improvised lecture, he was rash enough to include sleep in the list of instinctive reactions and on his return home tried to discover whether he had, in fact, said something foolish. He quickly rejected the classical interpretation that sleep is a toxic reaction, suggesting instead that sleep is anticipatory protection against toxicity, or more general protection, as with hibernation. [SeeSleep.]

In 1909, Claparéde served as general secretary of the Sixth International Congress of Psychology, of which Flournoy was president; thereafter he attended all the international congresses of psychology, becoming permanent secretary and so insuring continuity between successive congresses. (Later the International Union of Scientific Psychology was founded, with a permanent secretary general.)

As early as 1906, Claparède had established a seminar in educational psychology, but it was met with hostility from the academic authorities. He also published his Psychologie de I’enfant (1905b), four editions of which were rapidly sold out (even though this was only an introductory volume and the further volumes were, unfortunately, never written). In 1912 he founded the Institut J. J. Rousseau, for the purpose of promoting child psychology and its application to pedagogy. The institute was highly successful, although it was initially organized on a private basis; eventually, in 1947, it became affiliated with the University of Geneva under the name Institut des Sciences de I’Éducation. Claparède had been appointed associate professor of psychology at the university in 1908, and in 1919 he succeeded Flournoy in the chair of experimental psychology.

In the last 25 years of his life Claparède published a whole series of experimental studies. One particularly interesting study, which appeared in 1918, dealt with the child’s awareness of similarity and difference. In it, Claparède showed that although young children can much more readily describe differences between two objects (for example, a bee and a fly) than point out similarities, children do constantly generalize, which means making use of similarities. Accordingly, he formulated his “law of awareness,” which states that the individual is not aware of mechanisms that work smoothly, awareness being aroused only by conflicts, problems, or maladjustments in general. [SeeLearning, article ondiscrimination learning; Perception, article onPerceptualdevelopment.]

Claparède devoted some attention to the field of the growth of intelligence. He maintained that a child’s intelligence develops as he proceeds through a series of trials and errors (tâdtonne) first to handle material objects and then to formulate hypotheses. In an article published in 1933, Claparède studied the formation of these hypotheses. Instead of announcing only the result of the reflections that led to the solution of a problem, his subjects had been trained to think out loud, to produce, as it were, a “spoken reflection.” This procedure indicated that the subjects’ tentative steps were guided, and sometimes preceded, by a kind of insight into “immediate implications”; Claparède gave a number of examples of such insights.

As early as 1929, at the closing session of the International Congress of Psychology at New Haven, Claparède spoke on the possible role that psychologists might play in international understanding, and he returned to this theme in 1937 in Paris, at the end of the Eleventh Congress. In 1928, he participated in the founding of the Bureau International de I’Éducation.

Jean Piaget

[For discussion of the subsequent development of Claparède’s ideas, seeConcept formation; Developmental psychology; Intellectual development; Problem solving.]

WORKS BY CLAPARÈDE

1897 Du sens musculaire à propos de quelques cas d’hémiataxie posthémiplégique. Geneva: Eggimann.

1903 L’association des idées. Paris: Doin.

1905a Esquisse d’une théorie biologique du sommeil. Archives de psychologie 4:245–349.

(1905b) 1911 Experimental Pedagogy and the Psychology of the Child. New York: Longmans. ? Translated from the 4th edition of Psychologie de I’enfant et pédagogie expérimentale by Mary Louch and Henry Holman.

1918 La conscience de la ressemblance et de la différence chez I’enfant. Archives de psychologie 17:67–78.

(1930) 1961 Autobiography. Volume 1, pages 63–97 in Carl Murchison (editor), A History of Psychology in Autobiography. New York: Russell. ? Translated from the French by P. Beineman.

1933 La genèse de I’hypothése: fetude expérimentale. Archives de psychologie 24:1–155.