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The institutionalization of psychology in the scientific field, since the beginning of the xxe century, was accompanied by the development of professional applications of this discipline. If the history and the nature of these professional applications are well known in certain areas (health, education, clinical psychology), it is not so in others, like industrial psychology. The aim of this article is to better understand the transformations of this branch of psychology and its professional applications since the interwar, in relation to the broader evolutions of psychology. Three periods are distinguished here : the interwar period, characterized by the emergence of a scientific discourse about the “aptitudes” and by the first applications in industry, the “glorious thirties” period, during which a beginning of professionalization takes place around psychotechnics, in relation with a deployment of state policies of vocational education and guidance and the recent period (since the 1970’s), characterized by a burst of the fields of application, the emergence of new markets for the profession (especially vocational inclusion and social management of unemployment) and a growing gap between the practitioners’ world and the scientific psychology. This study relies, notably, for the most recent period, upon the treatment of a survey conducted in 2002 among 2 000 post-graduated industrial psychologists.