Théodule-Armand Ribot

Who was Théodule-Armand Ribot?

Théodule-Armand Ribot, French psychologist, was born at Guingamp, and was educated at the Lycée de St Brieuc. He is known for Ribot's Law regarding retrograde amnesia.

In 1856 he began to teach, and was admitted to the École Normale Supérieure in 1862. In 1885 he gave a course of lectures on Experimental Psychology at the Sorbonne, and in 1888 was appointed professor of that subject at the College of France. His thesis for his doctors' degree, republished in 1882, Hérédité: étude psychologique, was his most important and best known book.

Following the experimental and synthetic methods, he brought together a large number of instances of inherited peculiarities. He paid particular attention to the physical element of mental life, ignoring all spiritual or nonmaterial factors in man. In his work on La Psychologie anglaise contemporaine: l'école expérimentale, he showed his sympathy with the sensationalist school, and again in his translation of Herbert Spencer's Principles of Psychology.

Besides numerous articles, he wrote on Arthur Schopenhauer, Philosophie de Schopenhauer, and on the contemporary psychology of Germany, also four little monographs on Les Maladies de la mémoire; De la volonté; De la personnalité; and La Psychologie de l'attention, which supplied useful data to the study of mental illness.