ANNÉE PSYCHOLOGIQUE, L'-

L'Année psychologique (AP) is the leading French review of scientific psychology. It was founded in 1894 by Henri Beaunis and Alfred Binet to publish the research activities conducted in the Sorbonne's psychology laboratory. Henri Beaunis was a physiologist and a representative of the School of Nancy. Alfred Binet was a psychologist and worked for seven years with Dr. Féré under Jean Martin Charcot (on animal magnetism, fetishism, and hysteria). He soon succeeded Beaunis as the head of the laboratory and the review.

The review went through three main periods: 1894-1911 (the date of Binet's death); 1912 to the end of the Second World War, when it was under the direction of Henri Piéron; and from the liberation of Paris until today, under the direction of Paul Fraisse. It was only during the first period, under Binet's editorship, that psychoanalysis featured prominently in the review, at a time when references to the subject were practically nonexistent in France. The principal center of interest then shifted to experimental psychology. The review consists of three sections: original papers, comments and reviews, and bibliographies.

Alfred Binet, a friend ofÉdouard Claparède and J Larguier des Bancels, both Swiss, became interested in psychoanalysis early in his career through his relation to psychopathology and forensic psychology. But he didn't read German. In 1908, he commissioned Carl Gustav Jung to write an article on psychoanalysis, "L'analyse des rêves" (The analysis of dreams), which appeared in the 1909 issue of the AP. However, in a letter to Freud, Jung qualified the article as an "insignificant, superficial thing." In 1912 there appeared an article by Alphonse Maeder entitled "Sur le mouvement psychoanalytique" (On the psychoanalytic movement). This much longer article acknowledged the development of a Freudian school that had renewed psychiatry and psychoanalysis.

In the AP under Pieron's direction, after 1912, psychoanalysis played a minor role, and was relegated to reviews of publications by Freud and Jung, written by Pieron. The tone is generally critical. As for the young French psychoanalytic movement, it was ignored by the AP. Following the liberation, Paul Fraisse replaced Henri Pieron as the editor-in-chief, reinforcing its experimental bias. After 1949 the term "psychoanalysis" simply disappeared from the bibliographic entries listed in the publication.

Annick Ohayon

See also: Maeder, Alphonse E.

Bibliography

Binet, Alfred, and Féré, Charles. (1887). Animal magnetism. New York, D. Appleton and Company.

Jung, Carl G. (1909b). The analysis of dreams. Coll. Works (Vol. IV). London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Maeder, Alphonse. (1912).Über die Funktion des Traumes (mit Berücksichtigung der Tagesträume, des Spieles, usw.). Jahrbuch für psychoanalytische und psychopathologische Forschungen, IV.

Ohayon, Annick. (1994). Lectures de la psychanalyse dans L'Année psychologique de Piéron, 1913-1945. Actes du XIIe Congrès annuel de Cheiron Europe. p. 263-270.