Ribot, Theodule

Theodul Ribot was born on December 18, 1839 in Brittany in the city of Guingamp . He studied at the Lyceum of Saint-Brieuc, and later became a member of his administration. Two years later he moved to Paris.

In the capital of France, he graduated from the Higher Normal School and received his doctorate in 1875. As a professor of comparative and experimental psychology, he worked at the College de France . In the teaching of psychology received academic recognition in France.

Ribot's works on psychology are distinguished by ease of presentation, an abundance of strictly verified medical facts and caution in conclusions. Ribot is a psychologist- empiricist mainly; he seeks to create an exact science from psychology in which the researcher’s personal views would be completely faded away.

At the same time, Theodul Ribot does not elevate empiricism to an unconditional principle and allows metaphysics as the search for ultimate causes, which is not included in the field of exact sciences. This attitude towards metaphysics, which is alien to one-sidedness, is also manifested in the Philosophical Review ( Revue philosophique ), a journal published by Ribot since 1876 , although it is dominated by a positive trend , but everyone else enjoys the widest hospitality . The journal contains works of not only French, but also foreign authors - German ( Eduard von Hartmann , Rudolf German Lotze , Gorvich, etc.), English ( George Henry Lewis , Spencer and others), Italian (Mantegazza), Russian ( Eugene Valentinovich De Roberti and Nikolai Yakovlevich Grot ).

In 1885 Ribot founded the Society of Physiological Psychology in Paris and became a professor at the Sorbonne , in 1888 he received a professorship at the Collège de France, where he soon became director of the first psychological laboratory. In 1889 in Paris, he organized the I International Psychological Congress with the aim of strengthening international relations and cooperation of psychologists from different countries ^[7] . According to J. Piaget : “From Ribot, the tradition of widespread use of pathologies and painful conditions as an experimental material begins in French psychological schools” ^[8] .

In 1886, to describe the characteristic psychological state in liver diseases, Ribot proposed the term “ anhedonia, ” which has been used in psychiatry to date ^[9] .

KS Stanislavsky was familiar with many of his works and, in theoretical justification of his acting system, turned to the psychological system of Ribot ^{[10] [11]} . Of his works, in particular, he borrowed the term “affective memory” (memory for feelings experienced in life), with the help of which the actor evokes the emotions necessary during the course of the play and experienced by him once in the circumstances of his own life. Since 1909, this term has been used sequentially by the director both in rehearsals and in theoretical recordings ^[12] .

• Theory of attention T. Ribot
• Ribot's Law