Conversations on Consciousness and the Bicameral Mind (Book Review)
William R. Woodward, Professor of Psychology, University of New Hampshire, and author of Hermann Lotze: An Intellectual Biography, August 2022.
Kuijsten’s fourth edited book on Jaynes is a marvel of collective scholarship across multiple disciplines. This book offers many perspectives on a proverbial elephant, Julian Jaynes’s 1976 theory that a transition occurred around 1200 B.C. from gods speaking to us to humans speaking and thinking for themselves. Kuijsten has assembled 22 conversations with scholars about their ongoing inquiries into evidence for Jaynes theory: hearing voices, clinical hypnosis, the Bible as written record, cave art, mentality in ancient Tibet, evolution of Greek language in ‘Homeric’ authors, and consciousness in children. Jaynes had a gift for combining classics, psychology, psychiatry, religion, archeology, and anthropology. He smashes disciplinary silos and prompts dialogue in new areas of cognitive linguistics and rhetoric. One author broaches an anthropological theory of mind, wherein the more people accept that the mind is porous, ‘the more voices and visions they reported.’ Another chapter extends the work of I. A. Richards in exploring the use of language as metaphor to get things done. In this book, you will hear the voices of the most open-minded scholars of our generation.