Henri Wallon, French philosopher, physician, and psychologist, has given psychology contribution not only with his emotion theory and with his arguments and disagreements with Jean Piaget. Among his less discussed contributions are the theory about intelligence, the discussions about the origin and development in children's discoursing thought, and, maybe less known, the reflections and propositions about the transition between sensory-motor intelligence (characterized by the capacity to solve practical problems, but without the aid of reflection) and discoursing intelligence (characterized by the use and intermediation of symbols and representations). It is known that his proposition for this transition, diversely from Piaget, who emphasizes continuity and preparation of the symbolic attributes by sensory-motor schematism, is in fact marked by the non-continuity between one intelligence and the other, by the interference of external elements such as culture, social aspects, and language, and by the complex interaction between all these elements. In order to better understand the Wallonian proposal about symbol formation it is necessary, therefore, to study his theory as a whole, trying to decode his concepts on emotion, symbolic behavior, intelligence, development factor, and so forth. In a society like ours, based on symbolic behavior, understanding the way it occurs, its origin, and the development of symbolic thought can be worthwhile.
Wallon; symbolic formation