Édouard Claparède

Édouard Claparède, born in 1873 and died in 1940, was a Swiss neurologist, child psychologist and educator. He received his medical degree from the University of Geneva in 1897 and worked at the Salpêtrière hospital in Paris. In 1901 he founded the journal Archives de psychologie with his cousin Théodore Flournoy, and from 1904 he was based at the University of Geneva, where he directed the experimental psychology laboratory and from 1915 held the chair of psychology. He founded the Rousseau Institute in 1912, led the Association Internationale de Psychotechnique from 1920, and co-founded the International Bureau of Education in 1925. He is known for an experiment with a woman who had lost her recent memory: he hid a pin in his hand while greeting her, and afterwards she hesitated to shake his hand without knowing why, showing that emotional memory can survive amnesia. He was briefly a member of the Zurich Freud Group but rejected what he saw as its dogmatism, while keeping an interest in psychoanalysis.