ABSTRACT
This chapter studies the work of Michel Bréal, and his Essaie de sémantique (1897). A contemporary of Freud, Bréal offers what could have contributed to a psychoanalytic science of language, one that configures language in opposition to a system of formal logic. His observations correspond well to the psychoanalytic configuration of language, especially as concerns parapraxes and paralogisms (e.g., reasoning cum hoc ergo propter hoc), as foundational to the generation of language. It also situates Bréal’s theories within those of the major nineteenth-century philologists, who viewed language as the central human science, inseparable from culture and thought. The chapter also studies the views of Julia Kristeva on the possibilities of combining psychoanalysis and the linguistic science of the second half of the twentieth century.
