Henri Wallon

Henri Wallon (1879 to 1962) was a French psychologist, philosopher, neuropsychiatrist, teacher and politician who built his scientific career on the study of child development. A grandson of the historian and statesman Henri-Alexandre Wallon, he entered the Ecole Normale Superieure in 1899, qualified in philosophy in 1902, became a doctor of medicine in 1908 and worked with intellectually disabled children until 1931. He earned his doctorate of letters in 1925 with a thesis on the turbulent child, held a chair of childhood psychology and education at the College de France from 1937 to 1949, and founded the journal Enfance in 1948. He described the child personality as a succession of stages in which affectivity and intelligence alternately predominate, a discontinuous and dialectical model that allowed for regression, unlike the model of Jean Piaget. A convinced Marxist, he also sat as a Communist deputy in 1945 and 1946 and chaired the education reform commission behind the Langevin-Wallon Project. His account of the child recognizing itself in the mirror influenced the mirror stage of Jacques Lacan.