The 'Other' Psychology of Julian Jaynes

Julian Jaynes (1920-1997) was famous for his controversial book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, first published in 1976. It is a book praised and excoriated in equal measure with insights from neuroscience, psychology, archaeology, history, linguistics and analysis of ancient texts. This book is a sympathetic account building on his work – it is important to understand that for him consciousness stands for interiority and is linguistically generated from metaphors and mental imagery as a socio-historical development. In this sense, it is transmitted culturally and humans are characterised by a developed conscious interiority. His explanation of features of conscious interiority is extremely helpful (p. 39). Interestingly, neither McVeigh nor Wile (see below) reference the work of Iain McGilchrist on the relationship between the two hemispheres, a significant omission. McGilchrist rejects Jaynes's argument that schizophrenia involves a regression to a primitive form of mentation, especially since the evidence suggests that the condition dates only from the 18th-century (see Madness and Modernism, by Louis Sass, recommended to me by Iain 20 years ago). Moreover, he argues that far from a breakdown of the bicameral mind as argued by Jaynes, the phenomena of hearing voices described is actually due to a relative separation of the two hemispheres. McVeigh still follows Jaynes' argument in this respect.

He proposes the need for a cultural – historical psychology and discusses the neuro-cultural malleability of the psyche, with specific examples from Bronze Age and China showing how linguo-conceptual and cognitive changes come about, drawing on detailed linguistic evidence. He provides extensive statistical analyses and datasets as well as useful explanations of Jaynes' terminology involving perception, superception and coception as alignment of perception and introception; also types of adaptive mentalities. The phenomenology of hearing voices is analysed exclusively as hallucinatory, as the author does not recognise the possibility of other beings communicating in this way in a manner that does not involve schizophrenia. As some readers will be aware, there is a flourishing field in psychiatry of spirit attachment, a phenomenon well-recognised in Brazil. So the idea of supernatural entities functioning in place of our inner selves may be misplaced, although each case should be examined in its context. Readers should also consult the author's excellent book A Psychohistory of Metaphors, reviewed in these pages in 2016.