Psychological realism

1. General Introduction

They belong to a specific trend in literature which is psychological realism.

We’ve talked about a change in the definition of realism because of a change in the definitions of the reality that the novel have to decribe, a change based on the discovery of new realities linked to the focalizer, the one who does the description. What is important to keep in mind is the fact that an entire part of the novel becomes preocuppied essentially with the mental situation/ state of the focalizer. An increased preoccupation with the mental state. Avec cet intêret grandissant concernant la diversité des points de vue apparait la préoccupation de l’état mental du personnage.

The consequence is the rise of clinical psychiatry. Until the end of the 19th century there was very little done for people mentally ill, they were putted in houses, clinics. Ex: Janes Eyre by Emily Brontë. She becomes a governess for a man she thinks he’s a widower, but the wife is hidden in the attic. Rise of the myth of the mad woman locked in the attic.

There is in the literary world rise of clinical psychiatry the attempt to understand and cure the mentally-ill. In fact this rise happened throught the collaboration of two major doctors.

i. one of them is called Charcot. Through experiments that he led in Paris, which led him to describ the symptoms of one of the major mental disease which is schizophrenia. ii. In fact Charcot’s discoveries were used by the first psychologist called William James in studies of the human mind. He was a Charcot’s studient. Il contribue à la dé-médicalisation des maladies mentales, idée que les malades peuvent rester dans le monde normal ainsi que l’idée qu’il y a une frontière assez floue entre des degrés infimes de la maladie qui permettent de vivre “normalement” et des degrés plus importants.

Se dessine deux tendances de la psychiatrie encore aujourd’hui en opposition : une qui dit que les causes