Conversations on Consciousness and the Bicameral Mind (Book Review)
Philip P. Ardery, Louisville, KY, August 2022.
In the 1990 edition of The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, Julian Jaynes added an Afterword to make explicit that his book advances four main hypotheses. In 2022’s, Conversations on Consciousness and the Bicameral Mind: Interviews with Leading Thinkers on Julian Jaynes’s Theory, editor Marcel Kuijsten, founder and executive director of the Julian Jaynes Society, has arranged 22 interviews into four sections, each section keying on one of Origin‘s hypotheses.
Conversations enables any reader to get deeper insight into Jaynes’s work and its impacts, and also into Kuijsten. Kuijsten has spent the last 25 years building the Society and recruiting to it a growing number of recognized scientists whose support is finally drawing mainstream attention to Jaynes’s highly original ideas — ideas that overturn long-held beliefs about human history and the human mind.
I’ll keep this review short by diving into only one of the book’s sections, “Bicameral Mentality.” Kuijsten writes, “Bicameral people lacked an inner mind-space to introspect, so in stressful or non-habitual situations they would hear a commanding voice instructing their behavior.” In this section of Conversations, contributor Brendan Leahy interviews Dutch psychiatrist Marius Romme, whose work began what now has grown into an immense and influential globe-spanning Hearing Voices Movement. It was after a voice-hearing patient persuaded Romme to read Origin that Romme discarded the prevailing medical view that voice hearing is a pathology and recognized voice hearing as a basic human capacity rich in meanings.
Conversations does more than advocate and promote Jaynes’s ideas and document their widening influence. The book’s “Bicameral Mentality” section concludes with Kuijsten interviewing partial skeptic John Kihlstrom, emeritus cognitive social psychologist at University of California, Berkeley. Kihlstrom tells Kuijsten, “I accept two and a half of Jaynes’s four hypotheses,” and the respectful sparring of these two thinkers over 30+ pages yields many sharp insights and rich food for reflection.
In the interest of full disclosure, this reviewer wants it known that he has membership in the Julian Jaynes Society and previously reviewed one other Kuijsten book on Amazon.