In the 19th century, “psychologism” characterized several approaches to linguistics. When psychologism reached its peak (around 1900), its crisis began, for several reasons. Furthermore, more or less in these same years, psychology itself underwent a profound crisis: “introspective” psychology was abandoned and behaviorism replaced it. This state of affairs caused the abandonment of psychologism. Things overturned starting from the 1950s: a strict relationship between language and mind, and consequently between language and psychology, was again argued for. A new struggle, then, started about what “cognitive linguistics” really is: while Chomsky considered language as a psychological entity organized according to principles of its own, scholars such as Langacker or Tomasello maintained that “cognitive linguistics stands out by resisting the imposition of boundaries between language and other psychological phenomena”. These latter approaches seem therefore much closer to 19th century psychologism than formal generative grammar.