Books Referencing Julian Jaynes’s Theory
Below is a sampling of the thousands of books that reference Julian Jaynes’s theory, showing its wide-ranging, ongoing influence — some of them may surprise you. (Inclusion in this list does not constitute an endorsement by the Julian Jaynes Society.)
Authors A – C | D – F | G – I | J – L | M – P | Q – Z
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After Silence: Rape & My Journey Back “The writer Julian Jaynes once remarked that language is an ‘organ of perception, not simple a means of communication.'” |
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Microsoft Windows Me for Dummies “‘This one sounds good,’ he said, reaching for a copy of Julian Jaynes’ ‘The Evolution [sic] of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.'” |
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The Mark of the Beast: The Continuing Story of the Spear of Destiny |
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Embracing Reality “This is a uniquely human accomplishment never before known in the realm of nature, therefore, following other scholars (such as Julian Jaynes), Wilber too is convinced that ‘the Mesolithic and Neolithic farming consciousness could only have been supported by a linguistically tensed consciousness …[thus] language became the predominant vehicle of the separate self (and thus culture at large).” |
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How to Write: Advice and Reflections “‘Psychology will never be a science,’ Jaynes told me, ‘until it can explain acting.'” |
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Opening the Mind’s Eye: How Images and Language Teach Us How To See “Julian Jaynes … suggested … that these animal paintings weren’t really ‘art.’ Rather, he argued, they might be a mechanical tracing of a vivid mental image projected by the eyes and brain of the draftsman onto the dim cave walls. This type of image — known as eidectic imagery — is present in as many as 1 in 10 present-day children, but hardly ever in the modern adult.” |
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Biomedicine: A Textbook for Practitioners of Acupuncture & Oriental Medicine “It may be that only humans possess true reflexive consciousness … Some feel this reflexive consciousness evolved rather recently in history. This is the theory of Julian Jaynes. While too detailed to describe in this text, his provocative book is worth reading.” |
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Neurology of the Arts: Painting, Music, Literature “Julian Jaynes in his well-known book … invented the terms ‘metaphrand’ (for that which is illuminated) and ‘metaphier’ (for that which does the illuminating), whilst Lakoff uses the term ‘target’ and ‘source.'” |
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Many Forms of Madness: A Family’s Struggle With Mental Illness and the Mental Health System “Julian Jaynes … saw this experience of voices, identified with gods or revelatory figures, as defining a whole era of early civilization when the key literature of religious traditions, such as the Iliad for ancient Greeks, the Bible for Jews and Christians, and the Qur’an for Muslims, was written.” |
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Alcoholic Iliad/Recovery Odyssey: Utilizing Myth as Addiction Metaphors in Family Therapy “…Jaynes believed that until the times written about in Homer’s epic poem the Iliad, human beings did not possess the mental capability to verbalize one’s thoughts inwardly, which is a feature of consciousness experienced by individuals today.” |
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The Paradoxes of Delusion: Wittgenstein, Schreber, and the Schizophrenic Mind “Jaynes interprets Schreber’s schizophrenia as the emergence of the ‘primitive mental organization’ of the ‘archaic, bicameral mind,’ which is supposedly devoid of awareness of itself as mind.” |
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Mindscan “But did you ever read Julian Jaynes? … Oh, I loved him in college! The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind – amazing book.” |
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WWW: Wake “Julian Jaynes’s theory was, quite literally, mind-blowing: that human consciousness really hadn’t existed until historical times.” |
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The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses |
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Existential-Integrative Psychotherapy: Guideposts to the Core of Practice “Julian Jaynes … writes about the development of consciousness and the struggle with I development.” |
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Entropy of Mind and Negative Entropy: A Cognitive and Complex Approach to Schizophrenia and its Treatment “The thesis that schizophrenia constitutes a type of regression to a prior evolutionary state that characterized … human development up until the historical period described in the Iliad has been advanced by Julian Jaynes in his fascinating book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.” |
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Authentic Happiness: Using the New Positive Psychology to Realize Your Potential for Lasting Fulfillment “One of my teachers, Julian Jaynes, kept an exotic Amazonian lizard as a pet in his laboratory.” |
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Blood Rites (UK release) |
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Muses, Madmen, and Prophets: Rethinking the History, Science, and Meaning of Auditory Hallucination “…Jaynes put forth his view that the ancient Greeks depicted in the Iliad actually heard the voices of the gods instructing them.” |
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Handbook of Visual Communication: Theory, Methods, and Media |
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Spirituality for the Skeptic: The Thoughtful Love of Life “Jaynes’s emphasis on ‘narrativity’ in consciousness is particularly important, and once again we find Hegel, 170 years earlier, making much the same point.” |
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A Short History of Philosophy “Julian Jaynes … entertains the tantalizing thesis that what we call ‘reflective consciousness’ might well have been experienced thirty centuries ago as an ‘inner voice’ rather than as our own.” |
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The Psychology of Religion, Third Edition: An Empirical Approach “In a provocative theory that postulates a neurophysiological basis for religion, Jaynes links modes of human consciousness with forms of culture that have emerged through evolutionary history.” |
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Left Brain, Right Brain: Perspectives From Cognitive Neuroscience |
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Evolution and the Big Questions: Sex, Race, Religion, and Other Matters “One of the most radical (and to my mind fascinating) connections made between language and consciousness… was made by Julian Jaynes.” |
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When Self-Consciousness Breaks: Alien Voices and Inserted Thoughts “…Julian Jaynes argues that in the ancient world people did standardly experience their inner speech as alien. In Jaynes’s speculation, verbal hallucinations are a vestige of an earlier developmental stage of human consciousness.” |
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Snow Crash |
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The Big U |
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The Paleolithic Paradigm “As Julian Jaynes pointed out, introspective mind-space has been a long-time coming to humans.” |
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Conscious Evolution: The Dance of Intuition and Intellect “Julian Jaynes writes of the brain ‘the earliest writings of men in a language that we really comprehend, when looked at objectively, reveals a very different mentality from our own.'” |
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Ancient Oracles: Making the Gods Speak
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ADD & ADHD for Dummies “For more on this topic, see Julian Jaynes’ The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.” |
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The Cosmic Cancer: Effects of Human Behavior on Life of Our Planet “Julian Jaynes … postulates that the human brain existed in a bicameral mind state within the last few thousand years, in which people were not conscious in the sense with which we are familiar.” |
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Imaginary Companions and the Children Who Create Them
Marjorie Taylor “….In contrast to Watkins, Jaynes associates the experience of imagined autonomous others with an early stage in the evolution of consciousness in human beings.” |
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The Fall: The Insanity of the Ego in Human History and the Dawning of A New Era
Steve Taylor “Jaynes suggested that before the second millennium BCE, human beings had no sense of ego at all.” |
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Metaphors in Mind: Transformation through Symbolic Modelling “To have a conscious imaginative representation requires an imagined ‘object of perception’ to be located somewhere in a ‘mind-space’ that Julian Jaynes says is the ‘first and most primitive aspect of consciousness.'” |
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Toward the End of Time |
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Civilizations Beyond Earth: Extraterrestrial Life and Society “Another difference from modern thought has been pointed out by Julian Jaynes in the oldest literature.” |
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The Joy of Reading: A Passionate Guide to 189 of the World’s Best Authors and Their Works |
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The Physics of Consciousness: The Quantum Mind and the Meaning of Life “As Julian Jaynes points out, ‘In the learning of skills, consciousness is indeed like a helpless spectator, having little to do.'” |
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Last Ape Standing: The Seven-Million-Year Story of How and Why We Survived “In the 1970s the Princeton psychologist and philosopher Julian Jaynes wrote a fascinating, bestselling book with the rather opaque title…” |
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Dynamical Cognitive Science “Without language and the memes it makes possible, however, even a human would be left with a simple, nonverbal, perceptual-motor concept of self, and could not achieve elaborate simulations of self in the metaphorical world to which verbal humans are prone (see Jaynes, 1976 …).” |
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Invisible Guests: The Development of Imaginal Dialogues “Perhaps no work has so eloquently consigned imaginal dialogues to the realm of primitivity as Julian Jaynes’ The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.” |
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David Bowie’s Low “Around this time Bowie was enthusiastically reading Julian Jaynes’s The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, a work that posits the essential schizophrenic nature of prehistoric man, and man’s religious impulse as a direct result of it.” |
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The Muse as Therapist: A New Poetic Paradigm for Psychotherapy |
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Art of Darkness: A Poetics of Gothic “Julian Jaynes speculates that the appearance of writing as a cultural force was directly related to the birth of consciousness as we know it.” |
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A Criminal History of Mankind “According to Jaynes, the authors of the Old Testament and the Epic of Gilgamesh, of the Iliad and the Odyssey, were entirely lacking in what we would call ‘self-consciousness.'” |
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Super Consciousness: The Quest for the Peak Experience “In a brillant and convincing book … Julian Jaynes labels this older type of culture ‘bicameral.'” |
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Alien Dawn: A Classic Investigation into the Contact Experience “Jaynes believes that, during the tremendous wars that convulsed the Middle East after 2000 BC, human beings were forced to acquire a new ruthlessness and efficiency in order to survive.” |
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Zen to Go: Bite-Sized Bits of Wisdom “Consciousness is always open to many possibilities because it involves play. It is always an adventure. — Julian Jaynes” |
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Taking the Quantum Leap: The New Physics for Nonscientists “Julian Jaynes … postulated that introspected volition — the ability to know that one is controlling one’s own destiny — has been a recent addition on the evolutionary scale.” |
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The Dreaming Universe: A Mind-Expanding Journey Into the Realm Where Psyche and Physics Meet |
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Psychology of Religion: Classic and Contemporary “The most elaborate development of this thesis is offered by research psychologist Julian Jaynes, who recasts the whole of humankind’s religious history in terms of the interplay of neurophysiology and culture.” |
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The Cambridge Handbook of Consciousness “Jaynes has made several provocative proposals that further Auerbach’s idea that a different kind of consciousness from our own is found in Genesisand The Iliad.” |
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Creating Circles & Ceremonies: Rituals for All Seasons And Reasons “Princeton research psychologist Julian Jaynes presents a compelling thesis in his 1976 book, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.” |
Authors A – C | D – F | G – I | J – L | M – P | Q – Z