Marc Richelle (28th February 1930 – 6th January 2021)

Abstract

in Belgium, and held this chair from 1965 until his retirement in 1995. Like many European psychologists of his generation, his first degree was not in Psychology. He obtained a Master's in Philosophy and Letters from the University of Liège in 1952, and this may have resulted in his first publication, an analysis of a famous, and famously obscure, poem by Gérard de Nerval, "El Desdichado" (Richelle, 1952). This was followed by another Master's degree, this time from Geneva, where he was influenced not only by Piaget, but perhaps even more by the lesser-known figure of André Rey, with whom he collaborated on research on attention, as well as a project on North African Jewish children who emigrated to Israel. In the 1950s he also worked on cultural anthropology in Central Africa. In 1958 and 1959 he studied at Harvard, where he was introduced to Skinner's methods and ideas, which shaped much of his later career. After a doctorate from Liège in 1959 he obtained a position as a Lecturer at the same University, in the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters.He began the experimental work for which he later became well-known under the auspices of the Liège Department of Pharmacology, where he obtained laboratory space and was able to develop a unit specializing in animal operant conditioning, with what may have been the first appearance of Skinner boxes on the European continent. The fruits of this laboratory during the 1960s were