Home > Encyclopedia of Psychology > Bärbel Inhelder

1913-1997
Swiss psychologist and educator.

Bärbel Inhelder is permanently linked to Jean Piaget as a remarkable instance of scientific collaboration. Inhelder started working with Piaget in the early 1930s; by the 1940s, as she recalled, Piaget told her he needed her "to counter his tendency toward becoming a totally abstract thinker." Piaget never lost sight of his epistemological goals, while Inhelder was much more of a psychologist.

Inhelder was born in 1913 in the German-speaking Swiss city of St. Gall, the only child of cultured parents. In 1932, she moved to Geneva to study at Edouard Claparède's Rosseau Institute. At Piaget's suggestion, she examined children's comprehension of conservation of quantities. The book they published together on the subject in 1941 was the first of many other collaborations. In...