This paper explores Martin Crimp’s use of Carl G. Jung’s word association test in his 1997 play Attempts on Her Life. Looking at the way Crimp reproduces the list of one hundred stimulus words devised in 1909 by the Swiss psychoanalyst to test his patients' mental health, it shows that this collage of words, inserted rather randomly in the dialogue that takes place between three anonymous art critics in Scenario 11, ironically emphasises the absence of the main character, the suicidal artist, and highlights her refusal to undergo treatment. Indeed, Anne’s posthumous muteness both ignores the psychoanalyst’s lexical prompts and mocks the critics’ conflicting opinions about her mental health and artwork. By foiling these “attempts on her life”, this article argues that her silence reflects the power and limits of language and, more specifically, questions the value of contemporary art criticism especially when leading to moral judgements. At the same time, while both the failure of psychoanalysis and the “pointlessness” of pseudo-intellectual debates are highlighted, the subjective biases and personal points of view that make the art critics' heated discussion ironically points at the way the words they use do indeed work as emotional triggers, their responses suggesting that each of them is actually struggling with unconscious psychological complexes of their own - a case of motes and beams. A satirical criticism of the temptation to make any statement about someone else’s life and motives, Crimp's collage thus appears as an attempt to renew the use and function of dramatic language instead. While the critics’ debate ends in disagreement, the therapist's voice is sent back to its own solitude and becomes a dramatic event per se - a poetic performance for the stage. A similar resort to psychoanalysis and psychiatry can be found in Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis (2002): in these instances of "in-yer-head" theatre, the clinical voice of the mental health practitioner and the neurotic voice of the patient are turned into self-referential sources of authority and instances of stage poetry, displaying the musical materiality of words through the disappearance of the main character.