PSYCHOLOGY AND DIALECTICAL MATERIALISM

Author(s): HENRI WALLON

Source: International Journal of Mental Health, Vol. 1, No. 4, HENRI WALLON: HIS
WORLD, HIS WORK (Winter 1972/73), pp. 75-79
Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd.
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41343942
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Int. J. Ment. Health , Vol. 1, No. 4, pp. 75-79

International Arts & Sciences Press, 1973

PSYCHOLOGY AND DIALECTICAL MATERIALISM

HENRI WALLON

Is psychology a science? This question has often been posed by bourge

theorists. It has two possible meanings: Does psychology have an object in th

real world corresponding to it? Is the object of psychology compatible with
scientific determinism?

Auguste Comte, the father of positivism, answered the first question in the
negative. For him the individual was no more than a biological being, whose
study was properly the province of physiology, and a social being, explicable
collectively by sociology: two determinisms between which the human person is
reduced to nothing.
The second hypothesis is that of Bergson and his adherents and, in our own
day, of the existentialists. Science, they maintain, is a collection of constructs
that may well have a certain practical utility but that distort, adulterate, and
pervert reality. Reality is what is immediately experienced, or lived, by each
person; it is insight that, by revealing us to ourselves, also reveals the world to us.
The universe we imagine ourselves able to construct on the basis of this insight is
no more than a collection of arbitrary systems that smother our spontaneity.
Thus are we alienated from our freedom. The only truth is that which expresses

the essence of our being, i.e., the perpetual, unforeseeable, unique, and
incomparable recurrence of the impressions, feelings, or images that appear in an

unending succession in our consciousness. As this succession eludes any form of

determinism, the irrational becomes the very foundation of existence. In the
name of absolute freedom, each person is abandoned to fate, a fate linked, to be
sure, to the particular being of each, but no less inevitable on that account. This
position also implies a kind of passive participation in the existence of things

that emanate from our own existence, a kind of helpless and terrifying
responsibility for all that might result from our reactions, over which we have no

ultimate control. These despairing consequences of existentialism have been

particularly developed by the French writer Sartre. They are an indication of the
self-negation of the declining bourgeois class and evidence of its final decay.

This article, a translation of "Psychologie et materialisme dialectique,*' is from Societ,

1951,7, 241-246.
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HENRI WALLON

Self-negation linked with ideas of vastness: in the pathology of the min

of personal negation and personal immensity always go hand in hand.

The trait common to the positivist and the existentialist concept

notion of the powerlessness of the individual, crushed under the dual ne

of the natural order and the social order, possessed of a certain grande
regard to the universe, but without power to change it. Although he con
and contemplates it, the individual is also ruled by this universe, and c

intervene in it as an active force among all the other forces of wh

composed. The pretensions of bourgeois individualism thus finally foun

utter impotence.
These implications follow consistently from the two faults exposed by
( Materialism and empir io criticism) in the bourgeoisie's notion of scienc
is sometimes mechanistic, sometimes idealistic, and sometimes both at th

time: mechanism, which believes that the world is ultimately reducible t

and invariable elements, to effects that would in some way be of t

substance with it, to eternal laws, with neither change, nor novelty, nor pr

and to an ineluctable necessity foreseeable at every moment by an inte

vast enough to contemplate the universe in its entirety; and idealism,
begins with cognition in order to subordinate reality to it, posits consci
before matter, and makes thought the principle of being, thus seeking t
the world to its definitions and thereby to hold in check the revolutions

by an order of things and societies in constant change and evoluti

affirmation of a world that is basically always identical to itself is the p

which mechanism and idealism converge.

This static concept of science and the universe is counterbalance

specific distinction among the various disciplines of knowledge and am

various objects. Marx and Engels, however, insisted on the provisional a
these distinctions, seeing them as merely contingent on the limitation

intelligence and on the technical means at our disposal to explore

Indeed, the development and interpntration of the various sciences hav

them out. Nonetheless, certain barriers persist today that still seem insur
able. Thus psychology is sometimes classified as an outgrowth of biolog
sometimes as the anteroom of the humanities. To many, -the difference i

between biology and the humanities seems to create an unbridgeab

between them. Because of this ostensibly hybrid character of psycholo

often regarded as of negligible scientific worth. But because it is able

together two domains that a reactionary metaphysics still maintai

opposites, psychology becomes a matter of utmost relevance for dialecti

The recent hundredth anniversary of Pavlov's birth provided an occasi

Soviet scholars to demonstrate the entire dialectical scope of his work.

long time it had been considered to be purely mechanistic. Pavlov was
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PSYCHOLOGY AND DIALECTICAL MATERIALISM

elaborate conditioned reflexes by the mere temporal juxtaposition of sti

However, he himself noted that his method went beyond the meth

traditional physiology, which studied the organism function by functiontion, digestion, etc.- each with its specific reactions and equally specific st
In fact, Pavlov himself proceeded along the same line in his initial studi
with the conditioned reflex, not only are the interfunctional barriers t
scended but functional activity is linked up with the environment. Onto
stimulus specific to the expected functional reaction are grafted other s
that may belong to any domain whatever of relational activity.
This is the broader consequence of what Pavlov referred to as higher ne

activity, whose site he placed in the cerebral cortex, where connectio

established between every aspect of the life of the organism and all the st
that may come to act upon it from the outside. Higher nervous activity is
to the organization of the nervous system: it is not an added or suppleme
activity; rather, it is essential and integral. It arises out of the indispen
union between organism and environment and furnishes the organism w
systems of signs that enable it to respond appropriately to all circumstan
the environment to which the organism must respond is not only the p
environment: it is the environment on which each must depend for his ex
i.e., for man, the environment which he himself has created through his a
and in which he is immersed from birth- the social environment.

But in these interactions, at all times under the selective control of higher
nervous activity, between the organism and the environment, the biological is no

longer wholly distinct from the social. The interrelation of the two is primary
and fundamental. It is no longer valid to determine separately the properties of
the two according to their particular nature. A process is involved of which the

two, the biological and the social, are complementary constituents. This
substitution of process for property, of act for substance, is precisely the
revolution that dialectics has brought about in our modes of cognition.
The reciprocal interaction between the organism and the environment is also
incompatible with mechanism and idealism in all their forms. It is impossible to

fit it within the framework of the generally deductive relationship that

mechanism seeks to establish between elements and their various combinations.

The encounters between the organism and its environment necessitate responses
that cannot be predicted on the basis of the elements alone, because they must
be adapted to frequently accidental situations and hence are forced to evolve
new forms of behavior.

This reciprocity of action is also opposed to idealism, which seeks to

subordinate the real world to consciousness, because, contrary to idealism, it
cannot be a function of consciousness to set the order of the events that are to

confront it and that will determine or guide its responses. And finally, it is
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HENRI WALLON

opposed to existentialism and to its essential in determinism, because, in fact,

mental life is perpetually conditioned by the situations in which it is engaged

they in accord with its own propensities or contrary to them.

But relationships between the organism and the environment are furthe

enriched by the fact that the environment itself is not constant. A change in
environment may result in either the extinction or the transformation of
organisms existing within it. . . .

Thus it becomes the role of different environments, according to th

differences, to evoke or bring to the fore different capacities, already potent

present, in a species or in individuals. In the history of mankind, therefor

succession of different civilizations has given rise to diverse forms of activi

Historical materialism extends and crowns dialectical materialism. In transform-

ing the conditions of his life, man transforms himself. Modern techniques, to be

understood, developed, and often even applied, require a knowledge of abstract

formulas, systems of symbols in which perceptual images of the real world are
replaced by cues designating operations to be performed at the level that Pavlov

termed the second signal system, i.e., the system in which the cuing and
conditioned stimulus is no longer a sensation, but words and those increasingly
abstract substitutes for words- mathematical symbols.
In human activity speech has served as the instrument in a transformation

that has brought it by degrees from purely muscular activity to theoretical

activity, entailing a reorganization of cerebral operations. This does not mean,
however, that the one has replaced the other.
Through language, the conceptual sphere has acquired an organization and
structure based on stable, coherent, and logical systems. Our impressions and

actions for the most part terminate in, or proceed from, this sphere. But
although it rules over them, it has not abolished them. Underneath conceptual
(representational) thought are still to be found the gestures and attitudes that
seem to underline representational thought in children or the simple-minded and
that provide representational thought with its first rough contours in the form of

rituals or rites.* The rituals of primitive peoples usually draw on tremendous

emotional resources, which are dissipated as the intellectual image emerges in
their stead. Intellectual reflection dampens emotional agitation. But emotionality persists. When kept within bounds, it can act as a stimulant; but when it
holds sway, it cuts short or distorts reflection. In this way opposing activities

come into conflict, though one may initially stem from the other. These
affinities and oppositions are consonant with the laws of Marxist dialectics.

It is dialectics that has given psychology its stability and its meaning and
delivered it from the alternatives of elementary materialism or vapid idealism, or
*See H. Wallon (1942) De l'acte la pense. Paris: Flammarion.
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PSYCHOLOGY AND DIALECTICAL MATERIALISM

of crude substantialism or hopeless irrationalism. Through dialectics psyc

is able to be at once a natural science and a human science, thus abolishi
division between consciousness and things that spiritualism has sought to
on the universe. Marxist dialectics has enabled psychology to comprehen
organism and its environment, in constant interaction, as a single, unified

And finally, in Marxist dialectics psychology has a tool for explaini

conflicts out of which the individual must evolve his behavior and deve
personality.
Psychology is by no means unique in this respect. Dialectical materialism is
relevant to the entire realm of knowledge as well as to the realm of action. But
psychology, the principal source of anthropomorphic and metaphysical illusions,
must, more strikingly than any other science, find in dialectical materialism its
normal base and guiding principles.

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