Classical culture rigorously distinguishes between the soul and its ‘informants’: ‘Our senses are but the windows through which the soul sees what happens outside,’ as moralist François Lamy puts it. At the borders rather than on the ‘inside,’ the senses live in contact with space and objects: they witness the universe of ‘things.’ They are the messengers of the exterior, to the point of making us dependent on them, if not their captives. Lamy sensed this risk and denounced would-be victims of the senses, calling them ‘slaves of a dog, a cat, or of a mere trifle.’ At the end of the eighteenth century, however, an unprecedented transformation occurs in the relationship to the senses, leading to the creation of an ‘internal space’: that of a sensitivity specific to the internal organs. This creates a sixth sense (without naming it as such), which lingers on the curiosities it provokes, and begins a process of exploration. It constitutes nothing less than a rupture with the past, a change all the more decisive in that this specific sensitivity will soon become a matter not only of astonishment and deeper understanding, but a matter of affect as much as ‘knowledge,’ allowing the subject to address identity. This perspective, which develops slowly in the nineteenth century, ushers in our modernity.

A Long-Ignored ‘Space’

A symptom traditionally studied by doctors and investigators reveals the long-standing and relative ‘inattention’ to internal sensations: that is to say that, in certain despondent delusions or sorcerer's visions, the insistence was on internal transformation into physically different beings—various animals, curious materials, wild organisms, flesh of iron or paper. Ancient medicine and literature on witchcraft linger on this universe in which the body appears to be internally transformed, even upended. The most predominant symptom: lycanthropy, the belief that one has been turned into a wolf. The lycanthrope, the specter of ancient sorcery, roams the countryside ravaging and leaving carnage in its wake. It hounds, devours, hunkers down, barks; becoming thoroughly foreign to itself. No image of the ‘internal body’ is evoked by commentators at this time, however: no image of a confused or upended personal perception. In the late fifteenth century, Sprenger attributed the symptom to the presence of a devil occupying the body: not controlling its sensations, but commanding its movements, influencing actions, erratic and imposed, coming from the outside.