1873-1940
Édouard Claparède, a Swiss physician and psychologist, was born March 24, 1873, in Geneva, where he died September 30, 1940. He was born into a Protestant family that left Languedoc after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes; his father was a pastor. His precocious interest in natural science, the legacy of his childhood admiration for the paternal uncle whose name he bore, would have repercussions on his future career. Claparède did not feel any religious calling and envisaged a future in the sciences. The individual who had the greatest influence on him was his uncle Théodore Flournoy, nineteen years his senior. It was because of him that Claparède developed an interest in psychology. This interest led him to study medicine, which seemed to him "the best introduction to the study of mankind." He completed his medical studies in Geneva in 1897 after a brief period of study in Leipzig. In 1899 he became a collaborator with Flournoy, who turned over to him the job of running the psychology laboratory in 1904.
Together with his uncle, Claparède founded the Archives de psychologie in 1901, where the first French reviews of Freud's work appeared, together with that of other psychoanalysts. In 1903 they published Théodore Flournoy's review of The Interpretation of Dreams. There were several articles on Freud's work, includingÜber Psychotherpie ("On Psychotherapy"; 1905) and another on Zur Psychopathologie des Alltagslebens (The Psychopathology of Everyday Life; 1905). It was not long before discussions were underway to make the Archives de psychologie a French-language "psychoanalytic journal." This effort, undertaken by Carl Gustav Jung, was unsuccessful. But the review did publish work by Jung, Alphons Maeder, Charles Baudouin, Charles Odier, Henri Flournoy, and Raymond de Saussure. Every year critical essays on psychoanalytic works appeared, but the psychoanalysis section disappeared from the review in 1930.
In 1912 Claparède founded the Institut Jean-Jacques Rousseau, where the psychoanalysts Ernst Schneider (1916-1919) and Charles Baudouin began teaching in 1915. When Sabina Spielrein came to Geneva in 1920, she became his assistant. Oskar Pfister dreamed that the institute would become a place where "teaching psychoanalysts" would be trained. But his project never materialized.
Claparède was responsible for the first French translation of Freud'sÜber Psychoanalyse, Fünf Vorlesungen gehalten zur 20 jährigen Gründungsfeier der Clark University (Five Lectures on Psychoanalysis). The translation was published in the December 1920 and January and February 1921 issues of the Revue de Genève, with the title "Origine et développement de la psychanalyse." The translator was Yves Le Lay. Claparède added an introduction entitled "Freud et la psychanalyse."
Claparède took part in the Salzburg (1908) and Nuremberg (1910) Congresses. He founded the Cercle Psychanalytique de Genève (Geneva Psychoanalytic Circle) in 1919, of which he became president, but he did not belong to the Société Suisse de Psychanalyse (Swiss Society for Psychoanalysis), created on February 10, 1919. On September 19, 1919, he was invited to join. His correspondence with Freud was published by Carlo Trombetta (1970). He also corresponded with Oskar Pfister.
It can be assumed that Claparède underwent a certain amount of psychoanalysis with Pfister between 1915 and 1918. Was he analyzed by Sabina Spielrein during the twenties? We have no confirmation of this and if he did undergo analysis, it would only have been for a short period of time. Freud spoke of him as a dilettante. An eclectic individual, Claparède never wanted to become too deeply involved in psychoanalysis.
Aside from his essays in Archives de psychologie, Claparède published "Quelques mots sur la définition de l'hystérie" (1907), "De la représentation des personnes inconnues et des lapsus linguae" (1914), "Freud et la psychanalyse" (1920), "Quelques remarques sur le subconscient" (1923), "Freud va avoir quatre-vingt ans" (1936).
Claparède was not, strictly speaking, a psychoanalyst but he favored the diffusion of psychoanalysis in French-speaking Switzerland and, therefore, in France, and he defended psychoanalysis against its detractors. As Freud wrote to him on May 24, 1908, concerning psychoanalysis: Claparède is "in some sense a measure of the international growth to which we aspire."
Bibliography
Cifali, Mireille. (1982). "Entre Genève et Paris: Vienne," Bloc-notes de la psychanalyse, 2, 91-127.
——. (1991). Notes autour de la première traduction française d'une œuvre de Sigmund Freud. Revue internationale d'histoire de la psychanalyse, 4, 291-305.
Claparède, Edouard. (1920). Freud et la psychanalyse. Revue de Genève, 6, 850-851.
Trombetta, Carlo. (1970). "Claparède e Freud. Con publicazione di inediti," Orientamenti pedagogici, 17,6.
——. (1989).Édouard Claparède psicologo. Rome: Armando. Clark University
—MIREILLE CIFALI
