On revient toujours a ses premiers amours [One always returns to his first love]. Alfred Binet and fetishism

Known as the inventor in 1905, together with Theodore Simon, of the first intelligence test (the Binet-Simon Scale), the French psychologist Alfred Binet (1857-1911) is seen as an inspirer of Sigmund Freud. In fact, in his 1887 essay Le fetichisme dans l'amour ("Fetishism in Love") Binet was not only the first one to describe this sexual behavior, but he also suggested an environmental explanation that, totally antithetical to the psychiatric culture of the time, attracted Freud's interest. The epistemological background that allowed the meeting between Binet's ideas and Freud's thinking is seen in the "pathological method" of the French tradition, that had been embraced by Binet in psychology and, before him, by the first generation of French alienists and also by Theodule Ribot and Jean-Martin Charcot.