McVeigh - The Other Psychology of Julian Jaynes

The Other Psychology of Julian Jaynes

Ancient Languages, Sacred Visions, and Forgotten Mentalities

Brian J. McVeigh

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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 ones 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 Jayness particular understanding of consciousness (note that the Psychologist John Limber coined J-coni.e. Jaynesian consciousnessto 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

LRCUTA: Linguistics Research CenterUniversity of Texas

MW: MindWord

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: VoiceVolition

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 mans 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 (19201997) 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 cant 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 Jayness 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 maverickI once asked a graduate student in Princeton Universitys Psychology Department what Jayness 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 (18321920), William James (18421910), and Pierre Janet (18591947) 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 ( Vlkerpsychologie , 19001920) to be his more important, signature contribution.