Le langage de l’esprit à la croisée des chemins : Recherches littéraires, médicales et psychologiques sur le discours intérieur (1880–1900)

This article examines the convergence, at the end of the nineteenth century, of a disciplinary confrontation between medicine and psychology on the subject of internal language, and the publication of the first internal monologue, Édouard Dujardin’s Les lauriers sont coupés (1888). When attempting to describe the nature of internal language, doctors and psychologists identified traits that coincide with the poetics of the internal monologue. The increasing hegemony of medicine conferred an epistemological primacy to the brain, to the detriment of the mind, while the internal monologue marked the advent of a literary representation of the life of the mind which broke with the tradition of psychological analysis.