"Other" Psychology of Julian Jaynes

J. McVeigh Brian

Description

In his provocative but critically acclaimed theory about the origin of introspectable mentality, Julian Jaynes argued that until the late second millennium people possessed a different psychology: a "two-chambered" (bicameral) neurocultural arrangement in which a commanding "god" guided, admonished, and ordered about a listening "mortal" via voices, visions, and visitations. Out of the cauldron of civilizational collapse and chaos, an adaptive self-reflexive consciousness emerged better suited to the pressures of larger, more complex sociopolitical systems.Though often described as boldly iconoclastic and far ahead of it time, Jaynes's thinking actually resonates with a "second" or "other" psychological tradition that explores the cultural-historical evolution of psyche. Brian J. McVeigh, a student of Jaynes, points out the blind spots of mainstream, establishment psychology by providing empirical support for Jaynes's ideas on sociohistorical shifts in cognition. He argues that from around 3500 to 1000 BCE the archaeological and historical record reveals features of hallucinatory super-religiosity in every known civilization. As social pressures eroded the god-centered authority of bicamerality, an upgraded psychology of interiorized self-awareness arose during the Late Bronze Age Collapse. A key explanatory component of Jaynes's theorizing was how metaphors constructed a mental landscape populated with "I's" and "me's" that replaced a declining worldview dominated by gods, ancestors, and spirits. McVeigh statistically substantiates how linguo-conceptual changes reflected psychohistorical developments; because supernatural entities functioned in place of our inner selves, vocabularies for psychological terms were strikingly limited in ancient languages. McVeigh also demonstrates the surprising ubiquity of "hearing voices" in modern times, contending that hallucinations are bicameral vestiges and that mental imagery - a controllable, semi-hallucinatory experience - is the successor to the divine hallucinations that once held societies together.This thought-provoking work will appeal to anyone interested in the transformative power of metaphors, the development of mental lexicons, and the adaptive role of hallucinations.

Sujets

• Sociologie, société et politique
• Sociolinguistics
• Psychology

Informations

• Publié par: Andrews UK
• Date de parution: 17 janvier 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781845409739
• Langue: English

Extrait

The “Other” Psychology of Julian Jaynes
Ancient Languages, Sacred Visions, and Forgotten Mentalities
Brian J. McVeigh
imprint-academic.com




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Copyright © Brian J. McVeigh, 2018
The moral rights of the authors have been asserted. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form without permission, except for the quotation of brief passages in criticism and discussion.
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Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Rabbi James Cohn, Marcel Kuijsten, Michael Carr, Yu-Hui Chen, Bill Rowe, Scott Greer, Carole Brooks Platt, John Hainly, William Woodward, Yeufen Hsieh, Todd Gibson, and Barbara Greene for their advice and helpful comments. As always, my wife and family have been a source of support, comfort, and inspiration.
The germ for Chapter 6 was a graduate school paper entitled “Auditory Verbal Hallucinations and Right Hemispheric Activity: Evidence and Implications.” I am grateful to Prof. Donald Graves (Sage Graduate School) for offering invaluable advice.



Notes to the Reader and Abbreviations
Though Jaynes used “consciousness” in his writings, this term is vague, multi-referential, and misleading; in English “consciousness” has at least four very different meanings: (1) the physiological state of not sleeping; (2) the physiological state of not being in a coma; (3) a vague usage to describe some form of cognition, thinking, perception, or awareness; and (4) what one’s inner self introspects upon. For the sake of clarity I prefer “conscious interiority,” though throughout this book I will use consciousness and conscious interiority interchangeably; both refer to Jaynes’s particular understanding of consciousness (note that the Psychologist John Limber coined “J-con” - i.e. Jaynesian consciousness - to avoid confusion [2006]).
As much as possible I have attempted to present my arguments without cluttering the text with tables and charts, though to some degree this is unavoidable. Statistical analyses are placed in appendices, as are the corresponding datasets upon which the analyses are based. In order to make the hypotheses understandable while at the same time referencing relevant data and statistical evidence, I use six types of figures: (1) Charts offering basic facts; (2) Tables presenting numerical data; (3) App Calculations in appendices displaying statistical analyses and are referred to in chapters; (4) Hypothesis Logs summarizing research findings; (5) Datasets in appendices providing raw numbers; and (6) Graphs that visually quantify numerical values.
One final note: I distinguish between the academic discipline of Psychology (with a capitalized “P”) and the psychological (with a small “p”) or what since the late nineteenth century has been called mind or emotional, perceptive, and cognitive processes.
Abbreviations
ADC: Auxiliary Divine Communication
AIMP: “As If” Mortuary Practices
ARCC: Authority-Radiating Ceremonial Complexes
AVH: Auditory Verbal Hallucination
BA: Bronze Age
BCI Hypothesis: Bicameral Civilization Inventory Hypothesis
CAW: Centrality of Ancestor Worship
CG: Complex Graph
Chi-Sq G of F: Chi-Square Goodness of Fit
df: Degrees of Freedom
EmPL: Embryonic Psycholexicon
ePSD: Electronic Pennsylvania Sumerian Dictionary
ES: Effect Size
ETCSL: Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature
EV: Emotional Valence
HG: Hittite Grammar
IB: Intermediary Beings
IMRHA: Induction Methods for Right-Hemisphere Activation
LRC - UTA: Linguistics Research Center - University of Texas
MW: Mind–Word
NE: Negative Emotion
OHF: Objects of Hallucinatory Focus
PBCI Hypothesis: Postbicameral Civilization Inventory Hypothesis
PE: Positive Emotion
PL: Psycholexicon (Psychological Lexicon)
PS: Pictophonetic; Signific
RHD: Right-Hemisphere Dominance
RL: Religious Lexicon
SV: Supernatural Visitations
The Origin : The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (book by Julian Jaynes published in 1976)
TSO: Theocentric Social Order
VB: Vestigial Bicameralism (after ca. 1000 BCE)
VV: Voice–Volition



Introduction: The Need for a Cultural-Historical Psychology
“Could it be that ... silent ‘speech’ areas on the right hemisphere had some function at an earlier stage in man’s history that now they do not have?”
-Julian Jaynes
When I was a high school student my mother, always interested in anything off the beaten track, gave me a copy of The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1976) (henceforth The Origin ) in which Julian Jaynes (1920–1997) argued that before approximately 1200 BCE people possessed a different mentality. Boldly interdisciplinary and iconoclastic, Jaynes marshaled evidence from neuroscience, Psychology, archeology, history, linguistics, and the analysis of ancient texts. What Jaynes had to say about the duplex nature of the psyche resonated with something my mother used to say to me when as a young boy I would grumble about not being able to accomplish some difficult task: “Stop your complaining. If your brain hears you saying you can’t do something, it will believe you.” The mind, I concluded, is not unitary despite the strange illusion that it is. This piqued my interest in how the mind is put together. However, it was my older brother, Billy, who also has something to do with how my interests in the human mind developed. Diagnosed with autism from a very early age, Billy had an angelic countenance, was ordinarily shy, and hardly spoke. When he did, what he had to say was done in a telegraphic, soft-spoken, and gentle manner. But occasionally Billy would erupt, volcano-like, in extremely violent psychomotor seizures. These were ferocious but fortunately brief. Accompanying these attacks were guttural shouts, fearsome grunts, murderous threats, and language so foul and vile we could only wonder from where he had acquired such a formidable linguistic arsenal. It was as if an angry demon resided somewhere in his person. Surely, I thought, the individual psyche must be composed of different parts that, while perhaps ordinarily integrated, manifest themselves under the right conditions as independent entities.
Critically acclaimed but controversial, The Origin was far ahead of its time. Now Jaynes’s theories are increasingly gaining traction in a number of fields. With his unconventional theories that consciousness only emerged three thousand years ago and of the role of hallucinations in history, he relied heavily on extra-laboratory, non-experimental research to demonstrate how consciousness rests upon strata of accumulated ideas, i.e. consciousness is socially scaffolded through layers of time. He has been described as a “maverick” - I once asked a graduate student in Princeton University’s Psychology Department what Jaynes’s colleagues thought of him: a “well-regarded kook” was the answer. However, if viewed objectively against the backdrop of the history of Psychology and the original promise of this field, his approach is actually not that unusual. One may question his startling conclusions, but his premise that cultural and historical studies are indispensable for understanding psyche was not a foreign concept to the pioneers and founders of what would become modern Psychology. The likes of Wilhelm Wundt (1832–1920), William James (1842–1910), and Pierre Janet (1859–1947) all recognized the saliency and significance of long-term temporal changes, customs, religion, and anomalous behavior (e.g. hypnosis and trance). Indeed, an irony of intellectual history is how Wundt, though often regarded as the originator of experimental-laboratory Psychology, considered his ten-volume work on ethnocultural Psychology ( Völkerpsychologie , 1900–1920) to be his more important, signature contribution.
Clarifying the Confusion around “Consciousness”
The search is on for the neural correlates of consciousness. Popular contenders include the claustra (which have extensive linkages to other parts of the brain) and the temporoparietal junction. It has been suggested that gamma waves, which are strongest when one is concentrating, may have something to do with conscious states. The problem with such theories is that they confuse perception with introspection, sensation with subjectivity, and sensory experiences with that ineffable feeling of self-reflexiveness and “me-ness.” Such muddled thinking assumes consciousness to be essentially neurological, reducible to brain anatomy, and physically locatable. In fact, like cognition in general, consciousness is sociocultural and since it consists of information, ideational and relational (i.e. not existing in physical space). It is a conceptual system sustained and networked throughout society and transmitted down through time in the same way knowledge about politics, economics, and religion is. Reductionistic attempts to understand consciousness account for why some have such a difficult time at least entertaining the notion that conscious subjective mind is a cultural and historical product and process.
The Legacy of Julian Jaynes
This work offers another view, one informed by Julian Jaynes. Jaynes explained the nature and origins of consciousness; more specifically, unlike other theorists, he defines consciousness with a welcome, laser-focused clarity and, in doing so, provides a compelling and more accurate account of our history as a species. Allow me to cut to the chase and stress that Jaynes had something quite particular in mind when he theorized about consciousness (or as I prefer for the sake of clarity, “conscious interiority”), i.e. h