Discussions with Julian Jaynes

In 1976, the late Julian Jaynes of Princeton University published the groundbreaking The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind in which he argued that before the twelfth century BC, the minds of individuals were of a different neurocultural organisation. Rather than being consciously self-aware as people nowadays think of it, the behavior of our ancient predecessors was governed by religiously-inflected voices and visions. These were produced by a two-chambered or bicameral mentality: language areas in the right hemisphere (the ruler or god side) organised advice and admonishments and coded them into hallucinatory experiences that were conveyed over the anterior commissure to the left hemispheres corresponding language regions (the follower or person side). Brian J. McVeigh, a student of Julian Jaynes, took the opportunity in 1991 to record a series of informal, wide-ranging, and unstructured discussions with Jaynes, considered a controversial maverick of the psychology world. Weaving their way in and out of the discussions are the following themes: a clarification of the meaning of consciousness; the relation between linguistics, consciousness and language study as a crucial method to reveal this relation; the history of psychology and its prejudices (e.g., the marginalisation of consciousness as a research topic, ignoring socio-historical aspects of psyche, the significance of religion, the fraudulence of Freudianism, and the overuse, vagueness, and emptiness of cognitive); and some practical, therapeutic implications of Jayness ideas on consciousness. This book will appeal to anyone interested in the emergence of consciousness, language and cognition, cultural psychology, the history of psychology, and the neurocultural transformation of our species. A glossary of names provides useful historical context. Presenting a series of wide ranging and thought-provoking conversations with Julian Jaynes, who was one of the most insightful and original thinkers of the twentieth century, Discussions with Julian Jaynes constitutes an important contribution to the growing literature on Jaynes and his ideas.