Various essays by Henri Wallon have been transcribed. Below is an
introduction to his work.
Nate
http://marxists.org/archive/wallon/index.htm
Henri Wallon
Henri Wallon (1879-1962) was a Marxist psychologist well known in Europe,
but unlike Piaget, was never widely translated and read in the United
States. Like his contemporaries, Vygotsky and Piaget, Wallon was interested
in Genetic Psychology.
Piaget and Wallon often debated the merits of their ideas with Piaget
wanting to find areas of agreement, while Wallon felt it was more important
to emphasize their differences. While Piaget attempted to trace the
development of the child through logical structures, which emphasized
continuity from one stage to the next ( later stages could be understood in
a similar fashion as earlier ones with biological concepts such as
assimilation, adaptation, and equilibrium.), Wallon emphasized the
importance of human relations or practice and discontinuity in the
development of the child. Wallon argued that there is a unity not only
between stages but also within each stage itself. Wallon did not believe
development could be compartmentalized as Piaget attempted to do as in
cognitive, social, and emotional development. Wallon saw Piaget, while
offering some interesting insights, being characteristic of Rousseauian
vulgar individualism where social practice is understood only negatively as
in denying the (biological) essence of the individual to develop.
Wallon’s Genetic Psychology has much more in common with Lev Vygotsky. They
both were influenced by Marxism and utilized dialectical materialism
throughout their work. Wallon, like Vygotsky, put a strong emphasis to the
role of language and the social milieu in understanding the genesis of the
child. After the WW2, Wallon formed a psychology clinic that could be
compared to what today we would call a community health center. Like
Vygotsky’s emphasis on concept development, Wallon attempted to understand
and trace the genesis of the child within his or her social milieu.
Henri Wallon while rarely heard of in the United States offers the reader
an important glimpse of what a Marxist Psychology might look like. A
psychology where we cannot attempt to understand the genesis of the
individual without placing a strong emphasis on the social and cultural
forms that makes it possible.
"The individual, when he apprehends himself as such, is social in his
essence. He is social not as a result of external contingencies, but by
virtue of an internal necessity, by virtue of his genesis." Henri Wallon
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