Historical psychology seen by experimental psychology: Analysis of a missed encounter

Ignace Meyerson was a renowned and prestigious psychologist during the period between the two world wars. Nevertheless, his work has been completely forgotten by psychologists since the fifties. In order to clarify the reasons for this change, we have focused our attention on the reaction of experimental psychology to Meyerson's project of historical psychology presented in his thesis Les Fonctions psychologiques et les reuvres, in 1947. In Meyerson private archives, we have found an extensive review of the thesis by Paul Guillaume where he makes a certain number of critiques. In the other hand, there were some unidentified pages which happen to be Meyerson's response to the first text. In this paper we analyze the four main points of disagreement in this exchange : i.e., (a) the existence of two psychologies, one young and scientific and the other humanistic, (b) the conventional character of acts, (c) the objectivization of the mind in cultural productions, and (d) the application of a historical method in the study of psychological function. Since Guillaume didn't finally publish his article, this discussion has been kept in a private sphere. In order to recover this rich intellectual discussion, we offer an analysis of this exchange and the transcription of the texts.