The final chapter of Vygotsky's book Thinking and Speech bears the derivative title ‘Thought and word’ and suggests that this chapter reflects the concerns of the work as a whole rather than a part contributing to the whole. The chapter is also distinctive in other respects. Dictated in the final months of his life, it represents not only the end of a book but the last evidence we have of Vygotsky's most mature thought. It is strange that relatively little attention has been paid to this chapter in the form of extended commentary. One speculative reason is that in this chapter we encounter a very different portrait of Vygotsky, in which the other side of the coin, the head rather than the tail, is presented. In this chapter, Vygotsky takes a decisive turn inwards and, in his opening words (1987, p. 243), reminds the reader that ‘Our investigation began with an attempt to clarify the internal relationships between thought and word at the most extreme stages of phylogenetic and ontogenetic development.’ Contrary to a particular contemporary picture of Vygotsky as the patron of a kind of extraverted psychology in which explanations for human behaviour are sought on the outside beyond the skin and beyond consciousness, ‘in society’, or ‘in culture’, or ‘distributed’ among tools of various kinds, a different view emerges in this final chapter.