Paul Sollier

Who was Paul Sollier?

Paul Sollier was a French doctor and psychologist.

Sollier was born in Bléré, Indre-et-Loire.

While largely overlooked, Paul Sollier's writings are now being re-discovered, showing an extraordinarily modern conceptual thinking. Paul Sollier at the time was considered the most gifted pupil of Jean-Martin Charcot, together with Joseph Babinski. Because of his interest in psychology, unique at the time for a neurologist, but also his opposition to the leading figure in psychiatry Pierre Janet, Sollier was never well accepted by his contemporary neurologists and psychiatrists. He could not follow an academic career and was never elected to the Académie de Médecine, despite several applications.

His scientific and clinical interests encompassed classical neurological syndromes, but also hysteria, memory, emotions, and mental retardation, where he was the precursor of the development of the intellectual ratio. Already in the 1890s, he developed cognitive-behavioral therapies, which he applied to his most famous patient Marcel Proust. Proust largely inspired himself from Sollier's The Problem of Memory for his emphasis on involuntary memory in his novel In Search of Lost Time.