What Discipline Best Describes Jaynes's Approach?

[bmcveigh]

I was wondering if group members would share their opinions about how best to describe the Jaynesian agenda. One of the biggest challenges many face when trying to intellectually digest Jaynes is coming to terms with his decidedly interdisciplinary approach. He integrated very different bodies of knowledge (comparative psychology, neurology, religious history, linguistics, etc.) in a manner few do. His was not a mere multidisciplinary work (tackling a problem from different angles without intermeshing ideas), but a theoretical interlinking of disparate fields, producing something genuinely novel. So if we want to label the disciplinary coherence characterizing his work, what’s the best description? I have a list of candidates and was hoping readers could throw in their two cents, letting me know your opinions. The candidates include the following.

(1) “Psychohistory.” The problem with this term is that some see it and assume it is about an individual from a psychoanalytic perspective (rather than deep changes). But at least it is in relatively common usage so some are not completely thrown off when coming across it.

(2) “Cultural-historical psychology.” This is meant to describe a discipline that explores how the psyche, configured and contextualized by culture, changes through relatively short periods, e.g., millennia or centuries (cf. evolutionary psychology, which sees changes as genetically transmitted occurring over immense time scales).

(3) “Historico-cultural psychology.” This is just a variation on # 2, but perhaps with “historico” prefixing the expression, stresses the change dimension.

(4) “Historical psychology.” This has the disadvantage of being confused with the “history of psychology,” which is an established field investigating psychology as an institutionalized scholarly field. But at least at first blush it possesses an uncomplicated sense.

(5) “Archaeopsychology.” Here “archaeo” means the exploration of layers of cultural change; it does not mean archaeology in the “stones-and-bones” sense (though certainly archaeology as usually understood can enrich a Jaynesian approach). Finally,

(6) “Archaeomentality.” This is my neologism. It is intended to indicate deeper changes in psyche than “psychological” might suggest. It has the advantage of lacking the misleading associations one might make when considering other candidates.