ABSTRACT
Professional organizations in the sciences of the mind had been formed and academics were beginning to pursue the institutionalized study of psychology in the universities. The Psychological Society, founded in London in 1901, limited membership to those who taught or published in psychology, marking the arrival of a professional discipline of elites. The exchanges between literary and psychological texts in the nineteenth century bear out Gillian Beer's two-way traffic model, which sees the influence between science and literature moving in both directions. Nineteenth-century fiction importantly tackled the problem of how to represent mental states, with narrators sometimes offering external-third-person descriptions of characters' actions and thoughts and sometimes ostensibly first-person introspective representations of mind. In the 1760s, Anton Mesmer had posited the existence of a magnetic fluid that acted on and between animal bodies, maintaining that this fluid could be used for healing.
