The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

13 The classics in this field are Pierre Janet, The Major Symptoms of Hysteria, 1907 (2nd ed., New York: Holt, 1920) and Morton Prince, The Unconscious (New York: Macmillan, 1914). For an excellent discussion see Ernest Hilgard's "Dissociation Revisited" in M. Henle, J. Jaynes, and J. J. Sullivan, eds., Historical Conceptions of Psychology (New York: Springer, 1973).

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such dissociated processing is certainly reminiscent of the bicameral organization of mind itself, as well as the kind of nonconscious problem solving discussed in I.1.

Perhaps the least discussed aspect of hypnosis is the difference in the nature of the trance among persons who have never seen or known much about hypnosis before. Usually, of course, the trance is in our time a passive and suggestible state. But some subjects really do go to sleep. Others are always partly conscious and yet peculiarly suggestible until who can judge between acting and reality? Others tremble so severely that the subject has to be

'awakened'. And so on.

That such individual differences are due to differences in the belief or collective cognitive imperative of the individual is suggested by a recent study. Subjects were asked to describe in writing what happens in hypnosis. They were later hypnotized, and the results compared with their expectation. One 'awoke'

from the trance each time she was given a task for which she had to see. A later perusal of her paper showed she had written, "A person's eyes must be closed in order to be in a hypnotic trance."

Another could only be hypnotized on a second attempt. He had written, "Most people cannot be hypnotized the first time." And another could not perform tasks under hypnosis when standing.

She had written, "The subject has to be reclining or sitting."14

But the more hypnosis is talked about, even as on these pages, the more standardized the cognitive imperative and hence the trance becomes.

The Hypnotist as Authorization

And so, fourthly, a very particular kind of archaic authorization which also determines in part the different nature of the trance. For here, instead of the authorization being an hallucinated or possessing god, it is the operator himself. He is mani-14 T. R. Sarbin, "Contribution to Role-Taking Theory: I. Hypnotic Behavior,"

Psychology Review, 1943, 57: 255-270.

394 Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind in the Modern World festly an authority figure to the subject. And if he is not, the subject will be less hypnotizable, or will require a much longer induction or a much greater belief in the phenomenon to begin with (a stronger cognitive imperative).

Indeed, most students of the subject insist that there must be developed a special kind of trust relationship between the subject and the operator.15 One common test of the susceptibility to hypnosis is to stand behind the prospective subject and ask him to permit himself to fall voluntarily to see what it feels like to ‘let go’ . If the subject steps back to break his fall, some part of him lacking confidence that he will be caught, he almost invariably turns out to be a poor hypnotic subject for that particular operator.16

Such trust explains the difference between hypnosis in the clinic and in the laboratory. The hypnotic phenomena found in a medical psychiatric setting are commonly more profound, because, I suggest, a psychiatrist is a more godlike figure to his patient than is an investigator to his subject. And a similar explanation can be made for the age at which hypnosis is most easily done. Hypnotic susceptibility is at its peak between the ages of eight and ten.17 Children look up to adults with a vastly 15 Even Clark Hull, a strident behaviorist, the first to perform really controlled experiments in hypnosis, and who scorned introspective data, was compelled to look on hypnosis as "prestige suggestion," perhaps with "a quantitative shift in the upward direction which may result from the hypnotic procedure." Hypnosis and Suggestibility: An Experimental Approach (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1933), p. 392.

16 See Ernest Hilgard, Hypnotic Susceptibility (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1965), p. 101. Those investigating glossolalia, discussed in III.2, have remarked that the person able to "speak in tongues" must have a very similar kind of trust in his charismatic leader. When such trust in such a leader diminishes, so does the phenomenon. It would be a simple matter, using cassette recordings for hypnotic induction procedures, to manipulate the variable of prestige and really demonstrate the importance of this factor in hypnosis.

17 From the data of Theodore X. Barber and D. S. Calverley, "Hypnotic-Like Suggestibility in Children and Adults," Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 1963, 66: 5S9-597. In a forthcoming book, I shall be discussing the development of consciousness in the child, suggesting that this age of greatest hypnotic susceptibility is just after the full development of consciousness.

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greater sense of adult omnipotence and omniscience, and this thus increases the potentiality of the operator in fulfilling the fourth element of the paradigm. The more godlike the operator is to the subject, the more easily is the bicameral paradigm activated.

Evidence for the Bicameral Theory of Hypnosis If it is true that the relationship of subject to operator in hypnosis is a vestige of an earlier relationship to a bicameral voice, several interesting questions arise. If the neurological model outlined in I.5 is in the right direction, then we might expect some kind of laterality phenomenon in hypnosis. Our theory predicts that in EEG’s of a subject under hypnosis, the ratio of brain activity in the right hemisphere would be increased over that of the left, although this is complicated by the fact that it is the left hemisphere that to some extent must understand the operator. But at least we would expect proportionally more right hemisphere involvement than in ordinary consciousness.

At the present time we have no clear idea about even a usual E E G under hypnosis, such the conflicting findings of researchers.

But there are other lines of evidence, even if they are unfortunately more correlational and indirect. They are: Individuals can be categorized by whether they use the right or left hemisphere relatively more than others. A simple way of doing this is to face a person and ask questions and note which way his eyes move as he thinks of an answer. (As in 1.5, we are speaking only of right-handed people.) If to his right, he is using his left hemisphere relatively more, and if to the left, his right hemisphere — since activation of the frontal eye fields of either hemisphere turns the eyes to the contralateral side. It has been recently reported that people who, in answering questions face to face, turn their eyes to the left, who are thus using their right hemisphere more than most others, are much more susceptible to

396 Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind in the Modern World hypnosis.18 This can be interpreted as indicating that hypnosis may involve the right hemisphere in very special ways, that the more easily hypnotized person is the one who can ‘listen to* and

‘rely on’ the right hemisphere more than others.

As we saw in I.5, the right hemisphere, which we have presumed to have been the source of divine hallucinations in earlier millennia, is presently considered to be the more creative, spatial, and responsible for vivid imagery. Several recent studies have found that individuals who manifest these characteristics more than others are indeed more susceptible to hypnosis.19

These findings are consistent with the hypothesis that hypnosis is a reliance on right hemisphere categories, just as a bicameral man relied on his divine guidance.

If calling hypnosis a vestige of the bicameral mind is valid, we might also expect that those most susceptible to being hypnotized would be those most susceptible to other instances of the general bicameral paradigm. In regard to religious involvement, this appears to be true. Persons who have attended church regularly since childhood are more susceptible to hypnosis, while those who have had less religious involvement tend to be less susceptible. At least some investigators of hypnosis that I know seek their subjects in theological colleges because they have found such students to be more susceptible.

The phenomenon of imaginary companions in childhood is something I shall have more to say about in a future work. But it too can be regarded as another vestige of the bicameral mind. At least half of those whom I have interviewed remembered distinctly that hearing their companions speak was the same quality of experience as hearing the question as I asked it. True halluci-18 R. C. Gur and R. E. Gur, “Handedness, Sex, and Eyedness as Moderating Variables in the Relation between Hypnotic Susceptibility and Functional Brain As-symetry,” Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 1974, 83: 635-643.

19 Josephine R. Hilgard, Personality and Hypnosis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), Ch. 7. The data on which the next three paragraphs are based also come from her important book, Chs. 5, 8, and 14 respectively.

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nation. The incidence of imaginary companions occurs mostly between the ages of three and seven, just preceding what I would regard as the full development of consciousness in children. My thinking here is that, either by some innate or environmental predisposition to have imaginary companions, the neurological structure of the general bicameral paradigm is (to use a metaphor) exercised. If the hypothesis of this chapter is correct, we might then expect such persons to be more susceptible to the engagement of that paradigm later in life — as in hypnosis. And they are. Those who have had imaginary companions in childhood are easier to hypnotize than those who have not. Again it is a case where hypnotizability is correlated with another vestige of the bicameral mind.

If we can regard punishment in childhood as a way of instilling an enhanced relationship to authority, hence training some of those neurological relationships that were once the bicameral mind, we might expect this to increase hypnotic susceptibility. And this is true. Careful studies show that those who have experienced severe punishment in childhood and come from a disciplined home are more easily hypnotized, while those who were rarely punished or not punished at all tend to be less susceptible to hypnosis.

These laboratory findings are only suggestive, and there are quite different ways of understanding them, for which I refer the reader to the original reports. But together they do form a pattern which lends support to the hypothesis that hypnosis is in part a vestige of a preconscious mentality. Placing the phenomena of hypnosis against the broad historical background of mankind in this way gives them certain contours that they would not otherwise have. If one has a very definite biological notion of consciousness and that its origin is back in the evolution of mammalian nervous systems, I cannot see how the phenomenon of hypnosis can be understood at all, not one speck of it. But if we

398 Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind in the Modern World fully realize that consciousness is a culturally learned event, balanced over the suppressed vestiges of an earlier mentality, then we can see that consciousness, in part, can be culturally unlearned or arrested. Learned features, such as analog ‘I,’ can under the proper cultural imperative be taken over by a different initiative, and one such instance is what we call hypnosis. The reason that that different initiative works in conjunction with the other factors of the diminishing consciousness of the induction and trance is that in some way it engages a paradigm of an older mentality than subjective consciousness.

Objection: Does Hypnosis Exist?

Finally, I should briefly refer to possible alternative interpretations. But presently there are not so much theories of hypnosis as points of view, each correct as far as it goes. One view insists that imagination and concentration on what the hypnotist suggests, and the tendency of such an imagination to result in conforming action, are important.20 They are. Another, that it is condition of monomotivation that counts.21 Of course, that is a description. Another states that the basic phenomenon is simply the ability to enact different roles, the as-if nature of most hypnotic performances.22 This certainly is true. Another correctly stresses the dissociation.23 Another that hypnosis is a regression to a childlike relation to a parent.24 And indeed this is often how 20 Magda Arnold, "On the Mechanism of Suggestion and Hypnosis," Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 1946, 41 : 107-128.

21 Robert White, "A Preface to the Theory of Hypnotism," Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 1941, 16:477-505.

22 T. R. Sarbin, "Contributions to Role-Taking Theory." But see also his more recent paper with Milton Anderson "Role-Theoretical Analysis of Hypnotic Behavior,"

in J. E. Gordon.

23 Ernest Hilgard, "A Neodissociation Interpretation."

24 One of two psychoanalytic interpretations of hypnosis. See for example Mer-ton M. Gill and Margaret Brenman, Hypnosis and Related States (New York: International Universities Press, 1959). The other, that hypnosis is a love relationship between operator and subject, is no longer taken seriously.

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any vestige of the bicameral mind appears, since the bicameral mind itself is based on such admonitory experience.

But the main theoretical controversy — and it is a continuing one, and the one that is most important for us here — is whether or not hypnosis is really anything different from what happens every day in the normal state. For if this view is final, my interpretation in this chapter of a different mentality is utterly wrong. Hypnosis cannot be a vestige of anything since it does not really exist. All the manifestations of hypnosis, this position insists, can be shown to be simply exaggerations of normal phenomena. We can tick them off:

As for the kind of obedience to the operator, all of us do the same thing without thinking in situations that are so definedy as with a teacher or a traffic policeman, or perhaps the caller at a square dance.

As to such phenomena as suggested deafness, everyone has had the experience of 'listening' carefully to another person and yet not hearing a word. And so the mother who sleeps through a thunderstorm and yet hears and wakes to the cry of her baby is not engaging a different mechanism from that of the hypnotized subject who hears only the hypnotist's voice and is asleep to all else.

As for the induced amnesia which so astonishes an observer, who can remember what he was thinking five minutes ago? You must suggest to yourself a set or struction to remember at the time. And this the operator of the present day can do or not do, negating or enhancing the paraphrand of submersion, so that the subject does or does not remember.

As for the suggested paralysis under hypnosis, who has not been in discussion with a friend during a walk until, becoming more and more absorbed, both walk more slowly until you are standing still? Concentrated attention has meant arrest of movement.

As for hypnotic anesthesia, that most remarkable of hypnotic phenomena, who has not seen a hurt child distracted by a toy

400 Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind in the Modern World until the crying stops and the pain is forgotten? Or known of victims of accidents bleeding from unfelt wounds? And acupunc-ture may indeed be a related phenomenon.

And as for the "hidden observer," this kind of parallel processing goes on all the time. In ordinary conversation, we listen to someone and plan what we are going to say at the same time.

And actors do this constantly, always acting as their own hidden observers; Stanislavski to the contrary, they are always able to criticize their performances. And many of the examples of nonconscious thought in I.1, or my description of driving a car and conversing which opened I.4, are further instances.

And as for the startling success of post-hypnotic suggestion, we all sometimes decide to react to some event in a certain way and then do so, even forgetting our prior reason. It is really not different from 'pre-hypnotic suggestion', as in the supposed paralysis of the dominant hand a few pages ago. It is a structuring of the collective cognitive imperative that can predetermine our reactions in very specific ways.

And so for other remarkable feats performed under hypnosis j all are exaggerations of everyday phenomena. Hypnosis, the argument runs, just seems different to an observer. The trance behavior is simply intense concentration as in the proverbial

"absent-minded professor." Indeed a host of recent experiments have been aimed at showing that all hypnotic phenomena can be duplicated in waking subjects by simple suggestion.25

My reply, and it is the reply of others as well, is that this is not explaining hypnosis. It is explaining it away. Even though all of the phenomena of hypnosis can be duplicated in ordinary life (and I do not think they can), hypnosis can still be defined by distinct procedures, distinct susceptibilities which correlate with 25 The most prominent and untiring researcher with this view is Theodore X.

Barber. For Barber, "hypnosis" just does not exist as a state different from waking life, and the term should therefore always be written with quotation marks. Among his numerous papers, see his "Experimental Analysis of 'Hypnotic' Behavior: Review of Recent Empirical Findings," Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 1965, 70: 132-154.

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other experiences as well as other vestiges of the bicameral mind, and by huge differences in the ease with which hypnotic phenomena can be reproduced with and without hypnotic induction. In any speculation about possible future changes in our mentality, this latter difference is extremely important. That is why I began this chapter as I did. If we are asked to be animals, five-year-olds, painless when pricked, color-blind, cataleptic, or show nystagmus to imagined whirlings of the visual field,26 or to taste vinegar as champagne — it is enormously more difficult to do in our normal state of consciousness than when ordinary consciousness is absent under hypnosis. Such feats without rapport with an operator require grotesque efforts of persuasion and massive burdens of concentration. The full consciousness of the waking state seems itself like a huge wilderness of distracting closenesses that cannot easily be crossed to catch into such immediate control.

Try looking out the window and pretending to be red-green color-blind to such an extent that those colors really do look like shades of gray.27 It can be done to a certain extent, but it is much easier under hypnosis. Or get up now from where you are sitting and act like a bird, flapping your arms and emitting strange calls for for the next fifteen minutes, something easy to do under hypnosis. But there is not one reader of that last sentence who can do it — if he is alone. Whatever those sweaty feelings of foolish-ness or silliness are, the why-should-I5s and the this-is-absurd's, they crowd in like careful tyrants jealous as a god of such a performance; you need the permission of a group, the authoriza-26 J. P. Brady and E. Levitt, "Nystagmus as a Criterion of Hypnotically Induced Visual Hallucinations," Science, 1964, 146: 85-86. But I do not agree with the authors that this proves the existence of true hallucinations.

27 Normal subjects asked to respond to the Ishihara color-blindness test by trying not to see the color red and then by trying not to see green read some of the Ishihara cards in the manner expected from individuals with red or green color-blindness. This was shown by Theoder X. Barber and D. C. Deeley, "Experimental Evidence for a Theory of Hypnotic Behavior: I. 'Hypnotic Color-Blindness' without 'Hypnosis',"

International Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis, 1961, 9: 79-86. But under hypnosis this pseudo-color-blindness is easier to obtain, as in Milton Erickson's

"The Induction of Color-Blindness by a Technique of Hypnotic Suggestion," Journal of General Psychology, 1939, 20: 61-89.

402 Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind in the Modern World tion of a collective imperative as well as the command of an operator — or a god — to achieve such obedience. Or put your hands on the table in front of you and make one of them distinctly redder; possible for you to do now, but much easier under hypnosis. Or raise both your hands for fifteen minutes without feeling any discomfort, a simple task under hypnosis but onerous without it.

What is it then that hypnosis supplies that does this extraordinary enabling, that allows us to do things we cannot ordinarily do except with great difficulty? Or is it ‘we’ that do them? Indeed, in hypnosis it is as if someone else were doing things through us.

And why is this so? And why is this easier? Is it that we have to lose our conscious selves to gain such control, which cannot then be by us?

On another level, why is it that in our daily lives we cannot get up above ourselves to authorize ourselves into being what we really wish to be? If under hypnosis we can be changed in identity and action, why not in and by ourselves so that behavior flows from decision with as absolute a connection, so that whatever in us it is that we refer to as will stands master and captain over action with as sovereign a hand as the operator over a subject?

The answer here is partly in the limitations of our learned consciousness in this present millennium. We need some vestige of the bicameral mind, our former method of control, to help us.

With consciousness we have given up those simpler more absolute methods of control of behavior which characterized the bicameral mind. We live in a buzzing cloud of whys and wherefores, the purposes and reasonings of our narratizations, the many-routed adventures of our analog ‘ I’s. And this constant spinning out of possibilities is precisely what is necessary to save us from behavior of too impulsive a sort. The analog ‘ I’ and the metaphor ‘me’ are always resting at the confluence of many collective cognitive imperatives. We know too much to command ourselves very far.

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Those who through what theologians call the "gift of faith" can center and surround their lives in religious belief do indeed have different collective cognitive imperatives. They can indeed change themselves through prayer and its expectancies much as in post-hypnotic suggestion. It is a fact that belief, political or religious, or simply belief in oneself through some earlier cognitive imperative, works in wondrous ways. Anyone who has experienced the sufferings of prisons or detention camps knows that both mental and physical survival is often held carefully in such untouchable hands.

But for the rest of us, who must scuttle along on conscious models and skeptical ethics, we have to accept our lessened control. We are learned in self-doubt, scholars of our very failures, geniuses at excuse and tomorrowing our resolves. And so we become practiced in powerless resolution until hope gets undone and dies in the unattempted. At least that happens to some of us.

And then to rise above this noise of knowings and really change ourselves, we need an authorization that ‘we’ do not have.

Hypnosis does not work for everyone. There are many reasons why. But in one particular group who find hypnosis difficult, the reason is neurological and partly genetic. In such people, I think that the inherited neurological basis of the general bicameral paradigm is organized slightly differently. It is as if they cannot readily accept the external authorization of an operator because that part of the bicameral paradigm is already occupied. Indeed, they often seem to the rest of us as if they were already hypnotized, particularly when confined in hospitals as they commonly are from time to time. Some theorists have even speculated that that is precisely their condition — a continuous state of self hypnosis. But I think such a position is a dreadful misuse of the term hypnosis, and that the behavior of schizophrenics, as we call them, should be looked at in another way — which is what we shall do in the next chapter.

C H A P T E R 5

Schizophrenia

MOST OF US spontaneously slip back into something approaching the actual bicameral mind at some part of our lives. For some of us, it is only a few episodes of thought deprivation or hearing voices. But for others of us, with overactive dopamine systems, or lacking an enzyme to easily break down the biochemical products of continued stress into excretable form, it is a much more harrowing experience — if it can be called an experience at all. We hear voices of impelling importance that criticize us and tell us what to do. At the same time, we seem to lose the boundaries of ourselves. Time crumbles. We behave without knowing it. Our mental space begins to vanish. We panic, and yet the panic is not happening to us. There is no us. It is not that we have nowhere to turn; we have nowhere. And in that nowhere, we are somehow automatons, unknowing what we do, being manipulated by others or by our voices in strange and frightening ways in a place we come to recognize as a hospital with a diagnosis we are told is schizophrenia. In reality, we have relapsed into the bicameral mind.

At least that is a provocative if oversimplified and exaggerated way of introducing an hypothesis that has been obvious in earlier parts of this essay. For it has been quite apparent that the views presented here suggest a new conception for that most common and resistant of mental illnesses, schizophrenia. This suggestion is that, like the phenomena discussed in the preceding chapters,

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schizophrenia, at least in part, is a vestige of bicamerality, a partial relapse to the bicameral mind. The present chapter is a discussion of this possibility.

The Evidence in History

Let us begin with a glance, a mere side-glance, at the earliest history of this disease. If our hypothesis is correct, there should first of all be no evidence of individuals set apart as insane prior to the breakdown of the bicameral mind. And this is true, even though it makes an extremely weak case, since the evidence is so indirect. But in the sculptures, literature, murals, and other artifacts of the great bicameral civilizations, there is never any depiction or mention of a kind of behavior which marked an individual out as different from others in the way in which insanity does.

Idiocy, yes, but madness, no.1 There is, for example, no idea of insanity in the Iliad.2 I am emphasizing individuals set apart from others as ill, because, according to our theory, we could say that before the second millennium B.C., everyone was schizophrenic.

Secondly, we should expect on the basis of the above hypothesis that when insanity is first referred to in the conscious period, it is referred to in definitely bicameral terms. And this makes a much stronger case. In the Phaedrus, Plato calls insanity “a divine gift, and the source of the chiefest blessings granted to men.”3 And this passage preludes one of the most beautiful and 1 Even the word found in I Samuel 13 that is sometimes brought forward as the first reference to schizophrenia is the Hebrew halal, which is better translated as foolish in the sense of an idiot.

2 When E. R. Dodds suggests that a few places in the Odyssey refer to madness, I find his argument unconvincing. And when he concludes that there was a concept of mental disease common in Homer’s time, “and probably long before,” this is a completely unwarranted assertion. See E. R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), p. 67.

3 Phaedrus, 244A.

406 Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind in the Modern World soaring passages in all the Dialogues in which four types of insanity are distinguished: prophetic madness due to Apollo, ritual madness due to Dionysus, the poetic madness “of those who are possessed by the Muses, which taking hold of the delicate and virgin soul, and there inspiring frenzy, awaken lyrical and all other numbers,” and, finally, erotic madness due to Eros and Aphrodite. Even the word for prophetic, mantike, and the word for psychotically mad, manike, were for the young Plato the same word, the letter t being for him “only a modern and tasteless insertion.”4 The point I am trying to make here is that there is no doubt whatever of the early association of forms of what we call schizophrenia with the phenomena that we have come to call bicameral.

This correspondence is also brought out in another ancient Greek word for insanity, paranoia, which, coming from para +

nous, literally meant having another mind alongside one’s own, descriptive both of the hallucinatory state of schizophrenia and of what we have described as the bicameral mind. This, of course, has nothing whatever to do with the modern and etymologically incorrect usage of this term, with its quite different meaning of persecutory delusions, which is of nineteenth-century origin.

Paranoia, as the ancient general term for insanity, lasted along with the other vestiges of bicamerality described in the previous chapter, and then linguistically died with them about the second century A.D.

But even in Plato’s own time, a time of war, famine, and plague, the four divine insanities were gradually shifting into the realm of the wise man’s poetry and the plain man’s superstition.

The sickness aspect of schizophrenia comes to the fore. In later dialogues, the elderly Plato is more skeptical, referring to what we call schizophrenia as a perpetual dreaming in which some men believe “that they are gods, and others that they can fly,”5 in 4 Ibid., 244C.

5 Theaetetus, 158 .

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which case the family of those so afflicted should keep them at home under penalty of a fine.6

The insane are now to be shunned. Even in the exotic farces of Aristophanes, stones are thrown at them to keep them away.

What we now call schizophrenia, then, begins in human history as a relationship to the divine, and only around 400 B.C.

comes to be regarded as the incapacitating illness we know today.

This development is difficult to understand apart from the theory of a change in mentality which this essay is about.

The Difficulties of the Problem

Before looking at its contemporary symptoms from the same point of view, I would make a few preliminary observations of a very general sort. As anyone knows who has worked in the literature on the subject, there is today a rather vague panorama of dispute as to what schizophrenia is, whether it is one disease or many, or the final common path of multiple etiologies, whether there exist two basic patterns variously called process and reactive, or acute and chronic, or quick-onset and slow-onset schizophrenia. The reason for this disagreement and its vagueness is because research in the area is as obstinate a tangle of control difficulties as can be found anywhere. How may we study schizophrenia and at the same time eliminate the effects of hospitalization, of drugs, of prior therapy, of cultural expectancy, of various learned reactions to bizarre experiences, or of differences in obtaining accurate data about the situational crises of patients who, through the trauma of hospitalization, find it frightening to communicate?

It is beyond my effort here to sort out a way through these difficulties to any definitive position. Rather I intend to step around them with some simplicities on which there is wide agreement. These are, that there does exist a syndrome that can be 6 Laws, 934.

408 Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind in the Modern World called schizophrenia, that at least in the florid state it is easily recognized in the clinic, and that it is found in all civilized societies the world over.7 Moreover, for the truth of this chapter, it is not really important whether I am speaking of all patients with this diagnosis.8 Nor of the illness as it first appears, or as it develops subsequent to hospitalization. My thesis is something less, that some of the fundamental, most characteristic, and most commonly observed symptoms of florid unmedicated schizophrenia are uniquely consistent with the description I have given on previous pages of the bicameral mind.

These symptoms are primarily the presence of auditory hallucinations as described in I:4, and the deterioration of consciousness as defined in I:2, namely the loss of the analog the erosion of mind-space, and an inability to narratize. Let us look at these symptoms in turn.

Hallucinations

Again, hallucinations. And what I shall say here is merely adjunctory to my earlier discussion.

If we confine ourselves to florid unmedicated schizophrenics, we can state that hallucinations are absent only in exceptional cases. Usually they predominate, crowding in persistently and massively, making the patient appear confused, particularly when they are changing rapidly. In very acute cases, visual hallucinations accompany the voices. But in more ordinary cases, the patient hears a voice or many voices, a saint or a devil, 7 “The Experiential World Inventory” developed by H. Osmond and A. El. Miligi at the Princeton Neuro-Psychiatric Institute, has been given to schizophrenics in different countries and cultures with very similar results.

8 Nor of just such patients. There is a growing movement in psychiatry to distinguish diagnostic categories by the drugs specific to them, the schizophrenias by the phenothiazines and manic-depression by lithium. If this is correct, many patients formerly diagnosed as having paranoid schizophrenia are really manic-depressive since they respond only to lithium. In the manic phase, almost half of such patients have hallucinations.

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a band of men under his window who want to catch him, burn him, behead him. They lie in wait for him, threaten to enter through the walls, climb up and hide under his bed or above him in the ventilators. And then there are other voices who want to help him. Sometimes God is a protector, at other times one of the persecutors. At the persecuting voices, the patients may flee, defend themselves, or attack. With helpful consoling hallucinations, the patient may listen intently, enjoy them like a festivity, even weeping at hearing the voices of heaven. Some patients may go through all sorts of hallucinated experiences while lying under the blankets in their beds, while others climb around, talk loudly or softly to their voices, making all kinds of incomprehensible gestures and motions. Even during conversation or reading, patients may be constantly answering their hallucinations softly or whispering asides to their voices every few seconds.

Now one of the most interesting and important aspects of all this in respect to the parallel with the bicameral mind is the following: auditory hallucinations in general are not even slightly under the control of the individual himself, but they are extremely susceptible to even the most innocuous suggestion from the total social circumstances of which the individual is a part. In other words, such schizophrenic symptoms are influenced by a collective cognitive imperative just as in the case of hypnosis.

A recent study demonstrates this very clearly.9 Forty-five hallucinating male patients were divided into three groups. One group wore on their belts a small box with a lever which when pressed administered a shock. They were instructed to thus shock themselves whenever they began to hear voices. A second group wore similar boxes, were given similar instructions, but

®9 Arthur H. Weingaertner, “Self-administered aversive stimulation with hallucinating hospitalized schizophrenics,” Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 1971, 36: 422-429-

410 Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind in the Modern World pressing the lever did not give the patient a shock. A third group were given similar interviews and evaluation, but had no boxes.

The boxes, incidentally, contained counters which recorded the number of lever presses, the frequency ranging from 19 to 2362

times over the fortnight of the experiment. But the important thing is that all three groups were casually led to expect that the frequency of hallucinations might diminish.

It was of course predicted on the basis of learning theory that the shocked group alone would improve. But alas for learning theory, all three groups heard significantly fewer voices. In some cases the voices vanished completely. And no group was superior to another in this respect, showing clearly the huge role of expectation and belief in this aspect of mental organization.

A further observation is a related one, that hallucinations are dependent on the teachings and expectations of childhood — as we have postulated was true in bicameral times. In contemporary cultures where an orthodox excessive personal relationship to God is a part of the child’s education, individuals that become schizophrenic tend to hear strict religious hallucinations more than others.

On the British island of Tortola in the West Indies, for example, children are taught that God literally controls each detail of their life. The name of the Deity is invoked in threats and punishment. Churchgoing is the major social activity. When the natives of this island require any psychiatric care whatever, they invariably describe experiences of hearing commands from God and Jesus, feelings of burning in hell or hallucinations of loud praying and hymn-singing, or sometimes a combination of prayer and profanity.10

When the auditory hallucinations of schizophrenia have no particular religious basis they are still playing essentially the 10 Edwin A. Weinstein, “Aspects of Hallucinations,” Hallucinations, L. J. West, ed. (New York: Grune and Stratton, 1962), pp. 233-238.

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same role as I have suggested was true for the bicameral mind, that of initiating and guiding the patient’s behavior. Occasionally the voices are recognized as authorities even within the hospital.

One woman heard voices that were mainly beneficial which she believed were created by the Public Health Service to provide psychotherapy. Would that psychotherapy could always be so easily accomplished! They constantly gave her advice, including, incidentally, not to tell the psychiatrist that she heard voices.

They advised her on difficult pronunciations, or gave her hints on sewing and cooking. As she described it,

W h e n I am making a cake, she gets too impatient with me.

I try to figure it out all by myself. I am trying to make a clothspin apron and she is right there with me trying to tell me what to do.11

Some psychiatric investigators, particularly of a psychoanalytic persuasion, wish to infer by the associations the patient uses that the voices can “in all instances . . . be traced to persons who were formerly significant in the patients’ lives, especially their parents.”12 It is supposed that because such figures if recognized would produce anxiety, they are therefore unconsciously distorted and disguised by the patients. But why should that be so? It is more parsimonious to think that it is the patient’s experiences with his parents (or other loved authorities) that become the core around which the hallucinated voice is structured, even as I have suggested was the case with the gods in the bicameral era.

I do not mean that parents do not figure in hallucinations.

They often do, particularly in younger patients. But otherwise, the voice-figures of schizophrenia are not parents in disguise; they are authority figures created by the nervous system out of the patient’s admonitory experience and his cultural expecta-II A. H. Modell, “Hallucinations in schizophrenic patients and their relation to psychic structure,” in West, pp. 166-1735 the quotation is from p. 169.

12 Modell, in West, p. 168.

412 Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind in the Modern World tions, his parents of course being an important part of that admonitory experience.

One of the most interesting problems in hallucinations is their relation to conscious thought. If schizophrenia is partly a return to the bicameral mind, and if this is antithetical to ordinary consciousness (which it need not be in all cases), one might expect hallucinations to be the replacement of ‘thoughts.’

In some patients at least, this is how hallucinations first appear. Sometimes, the voices seem to begin as thoughts which then transform themselves into vague whispers, which then gradually become louder and more authoritative. In other cases, patients feel the beginning of voices “as if their thoughts were dividing.” In mild cases, the voices may even be under the control of conscious attention as are ‘thoughts.’ As one nondeluded patient described it:

Here I have been in this ward for two years and a half and almost every day and every hour of the day I hear voices about me, sometimes sounding from the wind, sometimes from foot-steps, sometimes rattling dishes, from the rustling trees, or from the wheels of passing trains and vehicles. I hear the voices only if I attend to them, but hear them I do. T h e voices are words that tell me one story or another, just as if they were not thoughts in my head, but were recounting past deeds — yet only when I think of them. T h e whole day through they keep on telling truly my daily history of head and heart.13

Hallucinations often seem to have access to more memories and knowledge than the patient himself — even as did the gods of antiquity. It is not uncommon to hear patients at certain stages of their illness complain that the voices express their thoughts before they have a chance to think them themselves.

This process of having one’s thoughts anticipated and expressed 13 Gustav Storring, Mental Pathology (Berlin: Swan Sonnenschein, 1907), p. 27.

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aloud to one is called in the clinical literature Gedankenlaut-werden and is approaching closely the bicameral mind. Some say they never get a chance to think for themselves; it is always done for them and the thought is given to them. As they try to read, the voices read in advance to them. Trying to speak, they hear their thoughts spoken in advance to them. Another patient told his physician that: “Thinking hurts him, for he can not think for himself. Whenever he begins to think, all his thoughts are dictated to him. He is at pains to change the train of thought, but again his thinking is done for him . . . In church he not infrequently hears a voice singing, anticipating what the choir sings

. . . If he walks down the street and sees, say, a sign, the voice reads out to him whatever is on it . . . If he sees an acquaintance in the distance, the voice calls out to him, ‘Look, there goes so and so,’ usually before he begins to think of the person. Occasionally, though he has not the least intention of noticing passersby, the voice compels him to attend to them by its remarks about them.”14

It is the very central and unique place of these auditory hallucinations in the syndrome of many schizophrenics which it is important to consider. Why are they present? And why is “hearing voices” universal throughout all cultures, unless there is some usually suppressed structure of the brain which is activated in the stress of this illness?

And why do these hallucinations of schizophrenics so often have a dramatic authority, particularly religious? I find that the only notion which provides even a working hypothesis about this matter is that of the bicameral mind, that the neurological structure responsible for these hallucinations is neurologically bound to substrates for religious feelings, and this is because the source of religion and of gods themselves is in the bicameral mind.

Religious hallucinations are particularly common in the so-14 Ibid., p. 30.

414 Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind in the Modern World called twilight states, which are a kind of waking dream in many patients, varying in time from a few minutes to a few years, six months’ duration being quite common. Invariably such states are characterized by religious visions, posturing, ceremony, and worship, a patient living with hallucinations just as in the bicameral state, except that the environment itself may be hallucinated and the hospital surroundings blotted out. The patient may be in contact with the saints in heaven. Or he may recognize doctors or nurses around him for what they are, but believe that they will prove to be gods or angels in disguise. Such patients may even cry with joy at talking directly with the inhabitants of heaven, may continually cross themselves as they converse with the divine voices or even with the stars, calling to them out of the night.

Often the paranoid, after a lengthy period of difficulties in getting on with people, may begin the schizophrenic aspect of his illness with an hallucinated religious experience in which an angel, Christ, or God speaks to the patient bicamerally, showing him some new way.15 He becomes convinced therefore of his own special relationship to the powers of the universe, and the pathological self-reference of all the occurrences around him then becomes elaborated into delusional ideas which may be pursued for years without the patient’s being able to discuss it.

Particularly illustrative of the tendency toward religious hallucinations is the famous case of Schreber, a brilliant German jurist around the close of the nineteenth century.16 His own extremely literate retrospective account of his hallucinations while ill with schizophrenia is remarkable from the point of view of their similarity to the relationships of ancient men to their gods. His disease began with a severe anxiety attack during which he hallucinated a crackling in the walls of his house. Then one night, 15 Eugen Bleuler, Dementia Praecox or The Grouf of Schizophrenias, Joseph Zinkin, trans. (New York: International Universities Press, 1950), p. 229.

16 D. P. Schreber, Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, I. MacAlpine and R. A.

Hunter, trans, and eds. (London: Dawson, 1955).

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the cracklings suddenly became voices which he immediately recognized as divine communications and “which since then have spoken to me incessantly.” The voices were continuous “for a period of seven years, except during sleep, and would persist undeterred even when I was speaking with other people.”17 He saw rays of light like “long-drawn-out filaments approaching my head from some vast distant spot on the horizon . . . Or from the sun or other distant stars that do not come towards me in a straight line, but in a kind of circle or parabola.”18 And these were the carriers of the divine voices, and could form into the physical beings of gods themselves.

As his illness progressed, it is of particular interest how the divine voices soon organized themselves into a hierarchy of upper and lower gods, as may be supposed to have occurred in bicameral times. And then, streaming down their rays from the gods, the voices seemed to be trying to “suffocate me and eventually to rob me of my reason.” They were committing “soul-murder,“ and were progressively “unmanning” him, that is, taking away his own initiative or eroding his analog Later in his illness, during more conscious periods, he narratized this into the delusion of being bodily turned into a woman. Freud, I think, overemphasized this particular narratization in his famous analysis of these memoirs, making the entire illness the result of repressed homosexuality that was erupting from the unconscious.19 But such an interpretation, while possibly related to the original etiology of the stress that began the illness, is not very powerful in explaining the case as a whole.

Now, can we have the temerity to draw a parallel with such phenomena of mental illness and the organization of gods in antiquity? That Schreber also had voice-visions of “little men” is suggestive of the figurines found in so many early civilizations.

17 Ibid., p. 225.

18 Ibid., pp. 227-228.

19 Sigmund Freud, “Psycho-analytic notes on an autobiographical account of a case of paranoia,” in Complete Psychological Works, Vol. 12, James Strachey, trans.

and ed. (London: Hogarth Press, 1958).

416 Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind in the Modern World And the fact that, as he slowly recuperated, the tempo of speech of his gods slowed down and then degenerated into an indistinct hissing20 is reminiscent of how idols sounded to the Incas after the conquest.

A further suggestive parallel is the fact that the sun as the world’s brightest light takes on a particular significance in many unmedicated patients, as it did in the theocracies of bicameral civilizations. Schreber, for example, after hearing his “upper God (Ormuzd)” for some time, finally saw him as “the sun . . . surrounded by a silver sea of rays . . .21 And a more contemporary patient wrote:

T h e sun came to have an extraordinary effect on me. It seemed to be charged with all power; not merely to symbolize God but actually to be God. Phrases like: “Light of the W o r l d , ” “ T h e Sun of Righteousness that Setteth Nevermore,”

etc., ran through my head without ceasing, and the mere sight of the sun was sufficient greatly to intensify this manic excitement under which I was laboring. I was impelled to address the sun as a personal god, and to evolve from it a ritual sun worship.22

In no sense am I thinking here that there is innate sun-worship or innate gods in the nervous system that are released under the mental reorganization of psychosis. The reasons that hallucinations take the -particular form they do lie partly in the physical nature of the world, but mostly in education and a familiarity with gods and religious history.

But I do mean to suggest

(1) that there are in the brain aptic structures for the very existence of such hallucinations,

20 Schreber, pp. 226, 332.

21 Ibid., p. 269.

22 J. Custance, Wisdom, Madness and Folly (New York: Pellegrini and Cudahy, 1952), p. 18.

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(2) that these structures develop in civilized societies such that they determine the general religious quality and authority of such hallucinated voices, and perhaps organize them into hierarchies,

(3) that the paradigms behind these aptic structures were evolved into the brain by natural and human selection during the early civilizing of mankind, and

(4) are released from their normal inhibition by abnormal biochemistry in many cases of schizophrenia and particularized into experience.

There is a great deal more to say about these very real phenomena of hallucination in schizophrenia. And the need for more research here cannot be overstressed. We would like to know the life history of hallucinations and how this relates to the life history of the patient’s illness, of this hardly anything is known. We would like to know more of how the particular hallucinatory experiences relate to the individuals upbringing.

Why do some patients have benevolent voices, while others have voices so relentlessly persecuting that they flee or defend themselves or attack someone or something in an attempt to end them? And why do still others have voices so ecstatically religious and inspiring that the patient enjoys them like a festivity?

And what are the language characteristics of the voices? Do they use the same syntax and lexicon as the patient’s own speech? Or are they more patterned as we might expect from III.3? All these are problems that can be resolved empirically.

When they are, they may indeed give us more insight into the bicameral beginnings of civilization.

The Erosion of the Analog ‘I’

Of what transcending importance is this analog we have of ourselves in our metaphored mind-space, the very thing with which we narratize out solutions to problems of personal action,

418 Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind in the Modern World and see where we are going, and who we are! And when in schizophrenia it begins to diminish, and the space in which it exists begins to collapse, how terrifying the experience must be!

Florid schizophrenic patients all have this symptom in some degree:

W h e n I am ill I lose the sense of where I am. I feel ‘I’ can sit in the chair, and yet my body is hurtling out and somer-saulting about 3 feet in front of me.

It is really very hard to keep conversations with others because I can’t be sure if others are really talking or not and if I am really talking back.23

Gradually I can no longer distinguish how much of myself is in me, and how much is already in others. I am a conglomera-tion, a monstrosity, modeled anew each day.24

My ability to think and decide and will to do, is torn apart by itself. Finally, it is thrown out where it mingles with every other part of the day and judges what it has left behind. Instead of wishing to do things, they are done by something that seems mechanical and frightening . . . the feeling that should dwell within a person is outside longing to come back and yet having taken with it the power to return.26

Many are the ways in which this loss of ego is described by patients who are able to describe it at all. Another patient has to sit still for hours at a time “in order to find her thoughts again.”

Another feels as if “he died away.” Schreber, as we have seen, talked of “soul-murder.” One very intelligent patient needs 23 Both quotations from patients of Dr. C. C. Pfeiffer of the Brain-Bio Center of Princeton, New Jersey, where schizophrenia is regarded as several biochemical illnesses primarily treatable by brain nutrients.

24 Storch as quoted by H. Werner, Comparative Psychology of Mental Development (New York: International Universities Press, 1957), p. 467.

25 From E. Meyer and L. Covi, “The experience of depersonalization: A written report by a patient,” Psychiatry, i960, 23: 215-217.

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hours of strenuous effort “to find her own ego for a few brief moments.” Or the self feels it is being absorbed by all that is around it by cosmic powers, forces of evil or of good, or by God himself. Indeed, the very term schizophrenia was coined by Bleuler to point to this central experience as the identifying mark of schizophrenia. It is the feeling of ‘losing one’s mind5, of the self ‘breaking off’ until it ceases to exist or seems to be unconnected with action or life in the usual way, resulting in many of the more obvious descriptive symptoms, such as “lack of affect” or abulia.

Another way in which this erosion of the analog ‘I’ shows itself is in the relative inability of schizophrenics to draw a person. It is, of course, a somewhat tenuous assumption to say that when we draw a person on paper, that drawing is dependent upon an intact metaphor of the self that we have called the analog ‘I’ But so consistent has this result been that it has become what is called the Draw-A-Person Test ( D A P ) , now routinely administered as an indicator of schizophrenia.26 Not all schizophrenic patients find such drawings difficult. But when they do, it is extremely diagnostic. They leave out obvious anatomical parts, like hands or eyes; they use blurred and unconnected lines; sexuality is often undifferentiated; the figure itself is often distorted and befuddled.

But the generalization that this inability to draw a person is a reflecting of the erosion of the analog ‘I’ should be taken with some circumspection. It has been found that older people sometimes show the same fragmented and primitive drawings as do these schizophrenics, and it should also be noticed that there is a considerable inconsistency with this result and the hypothesis being examined in this chapter. We have stated in an earlier 26 The first several years of research with the DAP have been reported in L. W.

Jones and C. B. Thomas, “Studies on figure drawings,” Psychiatric Quarterly Suffle-menty 1961, 35: 212-216.

420 Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind in the Modern World chapter that the analog ‘I’ came into being toward the end of the second millennium B.C. If the ability to draw a person is dependent upon the drawer having an analog ‘I’, then we would expect no coherent pictures of humans before that time. And this most definitely is not the case. It is obvious that there are ways of explaining this discrepancy, but I prefer to simply record the anomaly at this time.

We should not leave this discussion of the erosion of the analog ‘I’ without mentioning the tremendous anxiety in our own culture that accompanies it, and the attempt, sometimes successful, sometimes unsuccessful, to arrest this terrifying fading-off of that most important part of our interior selves, the almost sacramental center of conscious decision. In fact, much of the behavior that has nothing to do with any reversion to a bicameral mind can be construed as an effort to combat this loss of the analog

‘I’.

Sometimes, for example, there is what is called the “I am”

symptom. The patient in trying to keep some control over his behavior repeats over and over to himself “I am,” or “I am the one present in everything,” or “I am the mind, not the body.” Another patient may use only single words like “strength” or “life” to try to anchor himself against the dissolution of his consciousness.27

The Dissolution of Mind-Space

A schizophrenic not only begins to lose his ‘I’ but also his mind-space, the pure paraphrand that we have of the world and its objects that is made to seem like a space when we introspect. To the patient it feels like losing his thoughts, or “thought deprivation,” a phrase which elicits immediate recognition from the schizophrenic. The effect of this is so bound up with the erosion 27 Carney Landis, Varieties of Psychopathological Experience (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1964).

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of the analog ‘I’ as to be inseparable from it. Patients cannot easily think of themselves in the places that they are in and so they are unable to utilize information to prepare in advance for things that may happen to them.

One way this can be experimentally observed is in reaction-time studies. All schizophrenics of every type are much less capable than normally conscious people when they attempt to respond to stimuli presented to them at intervals of varying lengths. The schizophrenic, lacking an intact analog ‘I’ and a mind-space in which to picture himself doing something, is unable to “get ready” to respond, and, once responding, is unable to vary the response as the task demands.28 A patient who has been sorting blocks on the basis of form may be unable to shift to sorting them for color when instructed to sort in a different way.

Similarly, the loss of the analog ‘I’ and its mind-space results in the loss of as-if behaviors. Because he cannot imagine in the usual conscious way, he cannot play-act, or engage in make-believe actions, or speak of make-believe events. He cannot, for example, pretend to drink water out of a glass if there is no water in it. Or asked what he would do if he were the doctor, he might reply that he is not a doctor. Or if an unmarried patient is asked what he would do if he were married, he might answer that he is not married. And hence his difficulty with the as-if behavior of hypnosis, as I mentioned at the end of the previous chapter.

Another way the dissolving of mind-space shows itself is in the disorientation in respect to time so common in the schizophrenic.

We can only be conscious of time as we can arrange it into a spatial succession, and the diminishing of mind-space in schizophrenia makes this difficult or impossible. For example, patients may complain that “time has stopped,” or that everything seems to be “slowed down” or “suspended,” or more simply that they 28 This is an interpretation of a widely held theory of David Shakow, “Segrnental Set,” Archives of General Psychiatry, 1962, 6: 1-17.

422 Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind in the Modern World have “trouble with time.” As one former patient remembered it after he was well:

For a long time no days seemed to me like a day and no night seemed like a night. But this in particular has no shape in my memory. I used to tell time by my meals, but as I believed we were served sets of meals in each real day — about half a dozen sets of breakfast, lunch, tea, and dinner in each twelve hours —

this was not much help.28

On the face of it, this may seem inconsistent with the hypothesis that schizophrenia is a partial relapse to the bicameral mind.

For bicameral man certainly knew the hours of the day and the seasons of the year. But this knowing was, I suggest, a very different knowing from the narratization in a spatially successive time which we who are conscious are constantly doing. Bicameral man had behavioral knowing, responding to the cues for rising and sleeping, for planting and harvesting, cues so important that they were worshiped, as at Stonehenge, and were probably hallucinogenic in themselves. For someone coming from a culture where attention to such cues has been superseded by a different sense of time, the loss of that spatial successiveness leaves the patient in a relatively timeless world. It is interesting in this connection that when it is suggested to normal hypnotic subjects that time does not exist, a schizophrenic form reaction results.30

The Failure of Narratization

With the erosion of the analog and its mind-space, narratization becomes impossible. It is as if all that was narratized in the normal state shatters into associations subordinated to some gen-29 M. Harrison, Spinners Lake (London: Lane, 1941), p. 32.

30 Bernard S. Aaronson, “Hypnosis, responsibility, and the boundaries of self,”

American Journal of Clinical Hypnosisy 1967, 9: 229-246.

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eral thing perhaps, but unrelated to any unifying conceptive purpose or goal, as occurs in normal narratization. Logical reasons cannot be given for behaviors, and verbal answers to questions do not originate in any interior mind-space, but in simple associations or in the external circumstances of a conversation. The whole idea that a person can explain himself, something which in the bicameral era was distinctly the function of gods, can no longer occur.

With the loss of the analog ‘I’, its mind-space, and the ability to narratize, behavior is either responding to hallucinated directions, or continues on by habit. The remnant of the self feels like a commanded automaton, as if someone else were moving the body about. Even without hallucinated orders, a patient may have the feeling of being commanded in ways in which he must obey. He may shake hands normally with a visitor, but, asked about this, reply, “I don’t do it, the hand proffers itself.” Or a patient may feel that somebody else is moving his tongue in speech, particularly as in coprolalia, when scatalogical or obscene words are substituted for others. Even in early stages of schizophrenia, the patient feels memories, music, or emotions, either pleasant or unpleasant, which seem to be forced upon him from some alien source, and, therefore, over which ‘he‘ has no control.

This symptom is extremely common and diagnostic. And these alien influences often then develop into the full-blown hallucinations I have discussed earlier.

According to Bleuler, “conscious feelings rarely accompany the automatisms which are psychic manifestations split off from the personality. The patients can dance and laugh without feeling happy; can commit murder without hating; do away with themselves without being disappointed with life . . . the patients realize that they are not their own masters.”31

Many patients simply allow such automatisms to take place.

Others, still able to narratize marginally, invent protective de-31 Bleuler, p. 204.

424 Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind in the Modern World vices against such foreign control of their actions. Negativism itself, even, I think, in neurotics, is such. One of Bleuler’s patients, for example, who was inwardly driven to sing, managed to get hold of a small block of wood which he would cram into his mouth in order to stop his mouth from singing. At present we do not know whether such automatisms and inner commands are always the result of articulate voices directing the patient in his actions, as a relapse to the bicameral mind would suggest. It may indeed be impossible to know, since the split-off fragment of the personality that is still responding to the physician may have suppressed the bicameral commands which are being ‘heard’ by other parts of the nervous system.

In many patients this appears as the symptom called Command Automatism. The patient obeys any and every suggestion and command coming from the outside. He is incapable of not obeying authoritative short orders, even when otherwise negativ-istic. Such orders must deal with simple activities and cannot apply to a long complicated task. The well-known waxy flexibil-ity of catatonics may fall under this heading; the patient is really obeying the physician by remaining in any position in which he is placed. While not all such phenomena are, of course, characteristic of what we have called the bicameral mind, the underlying principle is. An interesting hypothesis would be that patients with such Command Automatism are those in whom auditory hallucinations are absent, and the external voice of the physician is taking its place.

Consistent with such an hypothesis is the symptom known as echolalia. When no hallucinations are present, the patient repeats back the speech, cries, or expressions of others. But when hallucinations are present, this becomes hallucinatory echolalia, where the patient must repeat out loud all that his voices say to him, rather than those of his environmental surroundings. Hallucinatory echolalia is, I suggest, essentially the same mental organization that we have seen in the prophets of the Old Testament, as well as the aoidoi of the Homeric poems.

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Body Image Boundary Disturbance

It is possible that the erosion of the analog ‘I’ and its mind-space also results in what is called Boundary Loss in Rorschach studies of schizophrenia. This is a score for the proportion of images seen in the ink blots that have poorly defined, fuzzy, or inexistent boundaries or edges. Most interesting from our point of view here is that this measure is strongly correlated with the presence of vivid hallucinatory experiences. A patient high in Boundary Loss often describes it as a feeling of disintegration.

W h e n I am melting I have no hands, I go into a doorway in order not to be trampled on. Everything is flying away from me. In the doorway I can gather together the pieces of my body. It is as if something is thrown in me, bursts me asunder.

W h y do I divide myself in different pieces? I feel that I am without poise, that my personality is melting and that my ego disappears and that I do not exist anymore. Everything pulls me apart . . . T h e skin is the only possible means of keeping the different pieces together. There is no connection between the different parts of my body . . ,32

In one study on Boundary Loss, the Rorschach was given to 80

schizophrenic patients. Boundary definiteness scores were significantly lower than in the group of normals and neurotics matched for age and socio-economic status. Such patients would commonly see in the ink blots mutilated bodies, animal or human.33 This mirrors the breaking up of the analog self, or the metaphor picture that we have of ourselves in consciousness. In another study of 604 patients in Worcester State Hospital, it was specifically found that Boundary Loss, including, we may presume, the loss of the analog ‘I’, is a factor in the development of hallucinations. Patients who had more hallucinations were those 32 P. Schilder, The Image and Appearance of the Human Body (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, and Co., 1935), p. 159.

33 S. Fisher and S. E. Cleveland, “The Role of Body Image in Psychosomatic Symptom Choice,” Psychological Monographs, 1955, 69, No. 17, whole no. 402.

426 Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind in the Modern World who were less successful in establishing “boundaries between the self and the world.”34

Along the same line of thought, chronic schizophrenic patients are sometimes unable to identify themselves in a photograph, or may misidentify themselves, whether they are photographed individually or in a group.

The Advantages of Schizophrenia

A curious heading, certainly, for how can we say there are advantages of so terrifying an illness? But I mean such advantages in the light of all human history. Very clearly, there is a genetic inherited basis to the biochemistry underlying this radically different reaction to stress. And a question that must be asked of such a genetic disposition to something occurring so early in our reproductive years is, what biological advantage did it once have?

Why, in the slang of the evolutionist, was it selected for? And at what period long, long ago, since such genetic disposition is present all over the world?

The answer, of course, is one of the themes I have stated so often before in this essay. The selective advantage of such genes was the bicameral mind evolved by natural and human selection over the millennia of our early civilizations. The genes involved, whether causing what to conscious men is an enzyme deficiency or other, are the genes that were in the background of the prophets and the ‘sons of the nabiim’ and bicameral man before them.

Another advantage of schizophrenia, perhaps evolutionary, is tirelessness. While a few schizophrenics complain of generalized fatigue, particularly in the early stages of the illness, most patients do not. In fact, they show less fatigue than normal persons and are capable of tremendous feats of endurance. They are not fatigued by examinations lasting many hours. They may move about day and night, or work endlessly without any sign of being tired. Catatonics may hold an awkward position for days that the 34 L. Phillips and M. S. Rabinovitch, Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 1958, 57: 181.

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reader could not hold for more than a few minutes. This suggests that much fatigue is a product of the subjective conscious mind, and that bicameral man, building the pyramids of Egypt, the ziggurats of Sumer, or the gigantic temples at Teotihuacan with only hand labor, could do so far more easily than could conscious self-reflective men.

A further thing that schizophrenics do ‘better’ than the rest of us — although it certainly is no advantage in our abstractly complicated world — is simple sensory perception. They are more alert to visual stimuli, as might be expected if we think of them as not having to strain such stimuli through a buffer of consciousness. This is seen in their ability to block E E G alpha waves more quickly than normal persons following an abrupt stimulus, and to recognize projected visual scenes coming into focus considerably better than the normal.35 Indeed, schizophrenics are almost drowning in sensory data. Unable to narratize or conciliate, they see every tree and never the forest. They seem to have a more immediate and absolute involvement with their physical environment, a greater in-the-world-ness. Such an interpretation, at least, could be put on the fact that schizophrenics fitted with prism glasses that deform visual perception learn to adjust more easily than the rest of us, since they do not overcompensate as much.36

The Neurology of Schizophrenia

If schizophrenia is in part a relapse to the bicameral mind, and if our earlier analyses have any merit, then we should find some kind of neurological changes that are consistent with the neurological model suggested in I.5. There I proposed that the halluci-35 See R. L. Cromwell and J. M. Held, “Alpha blocking latency and reaction time in schizophrenics and normals,” Perceptual and Motor Skills, 1969, 29: 195-201; E. Ebner and B. Ritzier, “Perceptual recognition in chronic and acute schizophrenics,”

Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 1969, 33: 200-206.

36 See E. Ebner, V. Broekma, and B. Ritzier, “Adaptation to awkward visual proprioceptive input in normals and schizophrenics,” Archives of General Psychiatry, 1971, 24: 367-371-

428 Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind in the Modern World nated voices of the bicameral mind were amalgams of stored admonitory experiences that were somehow organized in the right temporal lobe and conveyed to the left or dominant hemisphere over the anterior commissures and perhaps the corpus callosum.

Further, I have suggested that the advent of consciousness necessitated an inhibition of these auditory hallucinations originating in the right temporal cortex. But what precisely this means in a neuro-anatomical sense is far from clear. We definitely know that there are specific areas of the brain that are inhibitory to others, that the brain in a very general way is always in a kind of complicated tension (or balance) between excitation and inhibition, and also that inhibition can occur in a number of different ways. One way is an inhibition of an area in one hemisphere by excitation of an area in the other. The frontal eye fields, for example, are mutually inhibitory, such that stimulation of the frontal eye field on one hemisphere inhibits the other.37

And we may suppose that some proportion of the fibers of the corpus callosum which connects the frontal eye fields are inhibitory themselves, or else excite inhibitory centers on the opposite hemisphere. In behavior, this means that looking in any direction is programmed as the vector resultant of the opposing excitation of the two frontal eye fields.38 And this mutual inhibition of the hemispheres can be presumed to operate in various other bilateral functions.

But to generalize this reciprocal inhibition to asymmetrical unilateral functions is a more daring matter. Can we suppose, for example, that some mental process on the left hemisphere is paired in reciprocal inhibition with some different function on the 37 A. S. F. Layton and C. S. Sherrington, “Observation on the excitable cortex of chimpanzees, orangutan, and gorilla,” Quarterly Journal of Experimental Physiology, 1917, 11: 135.

38 The phrasing here is that of Marcel Kinsbourne in “The control of attention by interaction between the cerebral hemispheres,” Fourth International Symposium on Attention and Performance, Boulder, Colorado, August 1971.

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right, so that some of the so-called higher mental processes could be the resultants of the two opposing hemispheres?

At any rate, the first step in bringing some credence to these ideas about the relationship of schizophrenia to the bicameral mind and its neurological model is to look for some kind of laterality differences in schizophrenics. Do such patients have different right-hemispheric activity from the rest of us? Research on this hypothesis is only beginning, but the following very recent studies are at least suggestive:

• In most of us, the total E E G over a long time period shows slightly greater activity in the dominant left hemisphere than in the right hemisphere. But the reverse tends to occur in schizophrenia: slightly more activity in the right.39

• This increased right hemisphere activity in schizophrenia is much more pronounced after several minutes of sensory deprivation, the same condition that causes hallucinations in normal persons.

• If we arrange our E E G machine so that we can tell which hemisphere is more active every few seconds, we find that in most of us this measure switches back and forth between the hemispheres about once a minute. But in those schizophrenics so far tested, the switching occurs only about every four minutes, an astonishing lag.

This may be part of the explanation of the “segmental set” I have previously referred to, that schizophrenics tend to “get stuck” on one hemisphere or the other and so cannot shift from one mode of information processing to another as fast as the rest of us. Hence their confusion and often illogical speech and behavior in interaction with us, who switch back and forth at a faster rate.40

39 Arthur Sugarman, L. Goldstein, G. Marjerrison, and N. Stoltyfus, “Recent Research in EEG Amplitude Analysis,” Diseases of the Nervous System, 1973, 34: 162-181.

40 This is the preliminary work on a few subjects of Leonide E. Goldstein, “Time Domain Analysis of the EEG: the Integrated Method,” Rutgers Medical School preprint, 1975. I am grateful to him for discussing these suggestions with me.

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• It is possible that the explanation of this slower switching in schizophrenia is anatomical. A series of autopsies of long-term schizophrenics have, surprisingly, shown that the corpus callosum which connects the two hemispheres is i mm. thicker than in normal brains. This is a statistically reliable result. Such a difference may mean more mutual inhibition of the hemispheres in schizophrenics.41 The anterior commissures in this study were not measured.

• If our theory is true, any extensive dysfunction of the left temporal cortex due to disease, circulatory changes, or stress-induced alteration of its neurochemistry should release the right temporal cortex from its normal inhibitory control. When temporal lobe epilepsy is caused by a lesion on the left temporal lobe (or on both the left and right), thus (presumably) releasing the right from its normal inhibition, a full 90 percent of the patients develop paranoid schizophrenia with massive auditory hallucinations. When the lesion is on the right temporal lobe alone, fewer than 10 percent develop such symptoms. In fact this latter group tend to develop a manic-depressive psychosis.42

These findings need to be confirmed and explored further. But together they indicate without doubt and for the first time significant laterality effects in schizophrenia. And the direction of these effects can be interpreted as partial evidence that schizophrenia may be related to an earlier organization of the human brain which I have called the bicameral mind.

In Conclusion

Schizophrenia is one of our most morally prominent problems of research, such the agony of heart that it spreads both in those 41 Randall Rosenthal and L. B. Bigelow, “Quantitative Brain Measurements in Chronic Schizophrenia,” British Journal of Psychiatry, 1972, 121: 259-264.

42 P. Flor-Henry, “Schizophrenic-like Reactions and Affective Psychoses Associated with Temporal Lohe Epilepsy: Etiological Factors,” American Journal of Psychiatry, 1969, 126: 400—404.

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afflicted and in those who love them. Recent decades have watched with gratitude a strong and accelerating improvement in the way this illness is treated. But this has come about not under the banners of new and sometimes flamboyant theories such as mine, but rather in the down-to-earth practical aspects of day-today therapy.

Indeed, theories of schizophrenia — and they are legion — because they have too often been the hobbyhorses of competing perspectives, have largely defeated themselves. Each discipline construes the findings of others as secondary to the factors in its own area. The socio-environmental researcher sees the schizophrenic as the product of a stressful environment. The biochemist insists that the stressful environment has its effect only because of an abnormal biochemistry in the patient. Those who speak in terms of information processing say that a deficit in this area leads directly to stress and counterstress defenses. The defense-mechanism psychologist views the impaired information processing as a self-motivated withdrawal from contact with reality. The geneticist makes hereditary interpretations from family history data. While others might develop interpretations about the role of schizophrenogenic parental influence from the same data. And so on. As one critic has expressed it, “Like riding the merry-go-round, one chooses his horse. One can make believe his horse leads the rest. Then when a particular ride is finished, one must step off only to observe that the horse has really gone nowhere.43

It is thus with some presumption that I add yet one more loading to this heavy roster. But I have felt impelled to do so, if only out of responsibility in completing and clarifying the suggestiveness of earlier parts of this book. For schizophrenia, whether one illness or many, is in its florid stage practically defined by certain characteristics which we have stated earlier were the salient characteristics of the bicameral mind. The presence of 43 R. L. Cromwell, “Strategies for Studying Schizophrenic Behavior” (prepublica-tion copy), p. 6.

432 Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind in the Modern World auditory hallucinations, their often religious and always authoritative quality, the dissolution of the ego or analog and of the mind-space in which it once could narratize out what to do and where it was in time and action, these are the large resem-blances.

But there are great differences as well. If there is any truth to this hypothesis, the relapse is only partial. The learnings that make up a subjective consciousness are powerful and never totally suppressed. And thus the terror and the fury, the agony and the despair. The anxiety attendant upon so cataclysmic a change, the dissonance with the habitual structure of interpersonal relations, and the lack of cultural support and definition for the voices, making them inadequate guides for everyday living, the need to defend against a broken dam of environmental sensory stimulation that is flooding all before it — produce a social withdrawal that is a far different thing from the behavior of the absolutely social individual of bicameral societies. The conscious man is constantly using his introspection to find ‘himself’ and to know where he is, relevant to his purposes and situation. And without this source of security, deprived of narratization, living with hallucinations that are unacceptable and denied as unreal by those around him, the florid schizophrenic is in an opposite world to that of the god-owned laborers of Marduk or of the idols of Ur.

The modern schizophrenic is an individual in search of such a culture. But he retains usually some part of the subjective consciousness that struggles against this more primitive mental organization, that tries to establish some kind of control in the middle of a mental organization in which the hallucination ought to do the controlling. In effect, he is a mind bared to his environment, waiting on gods in a godless world.

CHAPTER 6

The Auguries of Science

IHAVE TRIED in these few heterogeneous chapters of Book III to explain as well as I could how certain features of our recent world, namely, the social institutions of oracles and religions, and the psychological phenomena of possession, hypnosis, and schizophrenia, as well as artistic practices such as poetry and music, how all these can be interpreted in part as vestiges of an earlier organization of human nature. These are not in any sense a complete catalogue of the present possible projections from our earlier mentality. They are simply some of the most obvious.

And the study of their interaction with the developing consciousness continually laying siege to them allows us an understanding that we would not otherwise have.

In this final chapter, I wish to turn to science itself and point out that it too, and even my entire essay, can be read as a response to the breakdown of the bicameral mind. For what is the nature of this blessing of certainty that science so devoutly demands in its very Jacob-like wrestling with nature? Why should we demand that the universe make itself clear to us?

Why do we care?

To be sure, a part of the impulse to science is simple curiosity, to hold the unheld and watch the unwatched. We are all children in the unknown. It is no reaction to the loss of an earlier mentality to delight in the revelations of the electron miscroscope or in quarks or in negative gravity in black holes among the stars.

434 Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind in the Modern World Technology is a second and even more sustaining source of the scientific ritual, carrying its scientific basis forward on its own increasing and uncontrollable momentum through history. And perhaps a deep aptic structure for hunting, for bringing a problem to bay, adds its motivational effluence to the pursuit of truth.

But over and behind these and other causes of science has been something more universal, something in this age of specialization often unspoken. It is something about understanding the totality of existence, the essential defining reality of things, the entire universe and man’s place in it. It is a groping among stars for final answers, a wandering the infinitesimal for the infinitely general, a deeper and deeper pilgrimage into the unknown. It is a direction whose far beginning in the mists of history can be distantly seen in the search for lost directives in the breakdown of the bicameral mind.

It is a search that is obvious in the omen literature of Assyria where, as we saw in II.4, science begins. It is also obvious a mere half millennium later when Pythagoras in Greece is seeking the lost invariants of life in a theology of divine numbers and their relationships, thus beginning the science of mathematics. And so through two millennia, until, with a motivation not different, Galileo calls mathematics the speech of God, or Pascal and Leib-nitz echo him, saying they hear God in the awesome rectitudes of mathematics.

We sometimes think, and even like to think, that the two greatest exertions that have influenced mankind, religion and science, have always been historical enemies, intriguing us in opposite directions. But this effort .at special identity is loudly false. It is not religion but the church and science that were hostile to each other. And it was rivalry, not contravention. Both were religious. They were two giants fuming at each other over the same ground. Both proclaimed to be the only way to divine revelation.

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It was a competition that first came into absolute focus with the late Renaissance, particularly in the imprisonment of Galileo in 1633. The stated and superficial reason was that his publica-tions had not been first stamped with papal approval. But the true argument, I am sure, was no such trivial surface event. For the writings in question were simply the Copernican heliocentric theory of the solar system which had been published a century earlier by a churchman without any fuss whatever. The real division was more profound and can, I think, only be understood as a part of the urgency behind mankind’s yearning for divine certainties. The real chasm was between the political authority of the church and the individual authority of experience. And the real question was whether we are to find our lost authorization through an apostolic succession from ancient prophets who heard divine voices, or through searching the heavens of our own experience right now in the objective world without any priestly intercession. As we all know, the latter became Protestantism and, in its rationalist aspect, what we have come to call the Scientific Revolution.

If we would understand the Scientific Revolution correctly, we should always remember that its most powerful impetus was the unremitting search for hidden divinity. As such, it is a direct descendant of the breakdown of the bicameral mind. In the late seventeenth century, to choose an obvious example, it is three English Protestants, all amateur theologians and fervently devout, who build the foundations for physics, psychology, and biology: the paranoiac Isaac Newton writing down God’s speech in the great universal laws of celestial gravitation j the gaunt and literal John Locke knowing his Most Knowing Being in the riches of knowing experience; and the peripatetic John Ray, an un-kempt ecclesiastic out of a pulpit, joyfully limning the Word of his Creator in the perfection of the design of animal and plant life. Without this religious motivation, science would have been mere technology, limping along on economic necessity.

The next century is complicated by the rationalism of the

436 Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind in the Modern World Enlightenment, whose main force I shall come to in a moment.

But in the great shadow of the Enlightenment, science continued to be bound up in this spell of the search for divine authorship.

Its most explicit statement came in what was called Deism, or in Germany, Vernunftreligion. It threw away the church’s “Word,’’

despised its priests, mocked altar and sacrament, and earnestly preached the reaching of God through reason and science. The whole universe is an epiphany! God is right out here in Nature under the stars to be talked with and heard brilliantly in all the grandeur of reason, rather than behind the rood screens of ignorance in the murky mutterings of costumed priests.

Not that such scientific deists were in universal agreement.

For some, like the apostle-hating Reimarus, the modern founder of the science of animal behavior, animal triebe or drives were actually the thoughts of God and their perfect variety his very mind. Whereas for others, like the physicist. Maupertuis, God cared little about any such meaningless variety of phenomena; he lived only in pure abstractions, in the great general laws of Nature which human reason, with the fine devotions of mathematics, could discern behind such variety.1 Indeed, the tough-minded materialist scientist today will feel uncomfortable with the fact that science in such divergent and various directions only two centuries ago was a religious endeavor, sharing the same striving as the ancient psalms, the effort to once again see the elohim “face to face.”

This drama, this immense scenario in which humanity has been performing on this planet over the last 4000 years, is clear when we take the large view of the central intellectual tendency of world history. In the second millennium B.C., we stopped hearing the voices of gods. In the first millennium B.C., those of us who still heard the voices, our oracles and prophets, they too 1 I discuss this more fully in my paper with William Woodward, “In the Shadow of the Enlightenment,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 1974, 10: 3-15, 144-159.

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died away. In the first millennium A.D., it is their sayings and hearings preserved in sacred texts through which we obeyed our lost divinities. And in the second millennium A.D., these writings lose their authority. The Scientific Revolution turns us away from the older sayings to discover the lost authorization in Nature. What we have been through in these last four millennia is the slow inexorable profaning of our species. And in the last part of the second millennium A.D., that process is apparently becoming complete. It is the Great Human Irony of our noblest and greatest endeavor on this planet that in the quest for authorization, in our reading of the language of God in Nature, we should read there so clearly that we have been so mistaken.

This secularization of science, which is now a plain fact, is certainly rooted in the French Enlightenment which I have just alluded to. But it became rough and earnest in 1842 in Germany in a famous manifesto by four brilliant young physiologists.

They signed it like pirates, actually in their own blood. Fed up with Hegelian idealism and its pseudoreligious interpretations of material matters, they angrily resolved that no forces other than common physicochemical ones would be considered in their scientific activity. No spiritual entities. No divine substances. No vital forces. This was the most coherent and shrill statement of scientific materialism up to that time. And enormously influential.

Five years later, one of their group, the famous physicist and psychologist Hermann von Helmholtz, proclaimed his Principle of the Conservation of Energy. Joule had said it more kindly, that “the Great Agents of Nature are indestructible,” that sea and sun and coal and thunder and heat and wind are one energy and eternal. But Helmholtz abhorred the mush of the Romantic. His mathematical treatment of the principle coldly placed the emphasis where it has been ever since: there are no outside forces in our closed world of energy transformations. There is no corner

438 Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind in the Modern World in the stars for any god, no crack in this closed universe of matter for any divine influence to seep through, none whatever.

All this might have respectfully stayed back simply as a mere working tenet for Science, had it not been for an even more stunning profaning of the idea of the holy in human affairs that followed immediately. It was particularly stunning because it came from within the very ranks of religiously motivated science.

In Britain since the seventeenth century, the study of what was called “natural history” was commonly the consoling joy of finding the perfections of a benevolent Creator in nature. What more devastation could be heaped upon these tender motivations and consolations than the twin announcement by two of their own midst, Darwin and Wallace, both amateur naturalists in the grand manner, that it was evolution, not a divine intelligence, that has created all nature. This too had been put earlier in a kindlier way by others, such as Darwin’s grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, or Lamarck, or Robert Chambers, or even in the exalta-tions of an Emerson or a Goethe. But the new emphasis was dazzling strong and unrelieving. Cold Un calculating Chance, by making some able to survive better in this wrestle for life, and so to reproduce more, generation after generation, has blindly, even cruelly, carved this human species out of matter, mere matter.

When combined with German materialism, as it was in the wantonly abrasive Huxley, as we saw in the Introduction to this essay, the theory of evolution by natural selection was the hollow-ing knell of all that ennobling tradition of man as the purposed creation of Majestic Greatnesses, the elohim, tnat goes straight back into the unconscious depths of the Bicameral Age. It said in a word that there is no authorization from outside. Behold! there is nothing there. What we must do must come from ourselves.

The king at Eynan can stop staring at Mount Hermon; the dead king can die at last. We, we fragile human species at the end of the second millennium A.D., we must become our own authorization. And here at the end of the second millennium and about to enter the third, we are surrounded with this problem. It is one

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that the new millennium will be working out, perhaps slowly, perhaps swiftly, perhaps even with some further changes in our mentality.

The erosion of the religious view of man in these last years of the second millennium is still a part of the breakdown of the bicameral mind. It is slowly working serious changes in every fold and field of life. In the competition for membership among religious bodies today, it is the older orthodox positions, ritually closer to the long apostolic succession into the bicameral past, that are most diminished by conscious logic. The changes in the Catholic Church since Vatican II can certainly be scanned in terms of this long retreat from the sacred which has followed the inception of consciousness into the human species. The decay of religious collective cognitive imperatives under the pressures of rationalist science, provoking, as it does, revision after revision of traditional theological concepts, cannot sustain the metaphoric meaning behind ritual. Rituals are behavioral metaphors, belief acted, divination foretold, exopsychic thinking. Rituals are mnemonic devices for the great narratizations at the heart of church life. And when they are emptied out into cults of spontaneity and drained of their high seriousness, when they are acted unfelt and reasoned at with irresponsible objectivity, the center is gone and the widening gyres begin. The result in this age of communications has been worldwide: liturgy loosened into the casual, awe softening in relevance, and the washing out of that identity-giving historical definition that told man what he was and what he should be. These sad temporizings, often begun by a bewildered clergy,2 do but encourage the great historical tide they are designed to deflect. Our paralogical compliance to verb-2 Theologians are well aware of these problems. To enter into their discussions, one might start with Harvey Cox’s The Secular City and then Mary Douglas’

Natural Symbolsy and then Charles Davis’ “Ghetto or Desert: Liturgy in a Cultural Dilemma,” in Worship and Secularization, ed. Wiebe (Vos, Holland: Bussum, 1970), pp. 10-27, and follow that with James Hitchcock’s The Recovery of the Sacred (New York: Seabury Press, 1974).

440 Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind in the Modern World ally mediated reality is diminished: we crash into chairs in our way, not go around them; we will be mute rather than say we do not understand our speech ; we will insist on simple location. It is the divine tragedy or the profane comedy depending on whether we would be purged of the past or quickened into the future.

What happens in this modern dissolution of ecclesiastical authorization reminds us a little of what happened long ago after the breakdown of the bicameral mind itself. Everywhere in the contemporary world there are substitutes, other methods of authorization. Some are revivals of ancient ones: the popularity of possession religions in South America, where the church had once been so strong; extreme religious absolutism ego-based on

“the Spirit,” which is really the ascension of Paul over Jesus; an alarming rise in the serious acceptance of astrology, that direct heritage from the period of the breakdown of the bicameral mind in the Near East; or the more minor divination of the I Ching, also a direct heritage from the period just after the breakdown in China. There are also the huge commercial and sometimes psychological successes of various meditation procedures, sensitivity training groups, mind control, and group encounter practices. Other persuasions often seem like escapes from a new boredom of unbelief, but are also characterized by this search for authorization: faiths in various pseudosciences, as in Scien-tology, or in unidentified flying objects bringing authority from other parts of our universe, or that gods were at one time actually such visitors; or the stubborn muddled fascination with extrasensory perception as a supposed demonstration of a spiritual surround of our lives whence some authorization might come; or the use of psychotropic drugs as ways of contacting profounder realities, as they were for most of the American native Indian civilizations in the breakdown of their bicameral mind. Just as we saw in III.2 that the collapse of the institutionalized oracles resulted in smaller cults of induced possession, so the waning of institutional religions is resulting in these

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smaller, more private religions of every description. And this historical process can be expected to increase the rest of this century.

Nor can we say that modern science itself is exempt from a similar patterning. For the modern intellectual landscape is informed with the same needs, and often in its larger contours goes through the same quasi-religious gestures, though in a slightly disguised form. These scientisms, as I shall call them, are clusters of scientific ideas which come together and almost surprise themselves into creeds of belief, scientific mythologies which fill the very felt void left by the divorce of science and religion in our time.3 They differ from classical science and its common debates in the way they evoke the same response as did the religions which they seek to supplant. And they share with religions many of their most obvious characteristics: a rational splendor that explains everything, a charismatic leader or succession of leaders who are highly visible and beyond criticism, a series of canonical texts which are somehow outside the usual arena of scientific criticism, certain gestures of idea and rituals of interpretation, and a requirement of total commitment. In return the adherent receives what the religions had once given him more universally: a world view, a hierarchy of importances, and an auguring place where he may find out what to do and think, in short, a total explanation of man. And this totality is obtained not by actually explaining everything, but by an encase-ment of its activity, a severe and absolute restriction of attention, such that everything that is not explained is not in view.

The materialism I have just mentioned was one of the first such scientisms. Scientists in the middle of the nineteenth century were almost numbed with excitement by dramatic discoveries of how nutrition could change the bodies and minds of 3 George Steiner in his articulate Massey Lectures of 1974 called these “mythologies” and discussed the point at greater length. I have borrowed some of his phrasing.

442 Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind in the Modern World men. And so it became a movement called Medical Materialism, identified with relieving poverty and pain, taking to itself some of the forms and all of the fervor of the religions eroding around it.

It captured the most exciting minds of its generation, and its program sounds distantly familiar: education, not prayers; nutrition, not communion; medicine, not love; and politics, not preaching.

Distantly familiar because Medical Materialism, still haunted with Hegel, matured in Marx and Engels into dialectical materialism, gathering to itself even more of the ecclesiastical forms of the outworn faiths around it. Its central superstition then, as now, is that of the class struggle, a kind of divination which gives a total explanation of the past and predecides what to do in every office and alarm of life. And even though ethnicism, nationalism, and unionism, those collective identity markers of modern man, have long ago showed the mythical character of the class struggle, still Marxism today is joining armies of millions into battle to erect the most authoritarian states the world has ever seen.

In the medical sciences, the most prominent scientism, I think, has been psychoanalysis. Its central superstition is repressed childhood sexuality. The handful of early cases of hysteria which could be so interpreted become the metaphiers by which to understand all personality and art, all civilization and its discontents. And it too, like Marxism, demands total commitment, initiation procedures, a worshipful relation to its canonical texts, and gives in return that same assistance in decision and direction in life which a few centuries ago was the province of religion.

And, to take an example closer to my own tradition, I will add behaviorism. For it too has its central auguring place in a handful of rat and pigeon experiments, making them the metaphiers of all behavior and history. It too gives to the individual adherent the talisman of control by reinforcement contingencies by which he is to meet his world and understand its vagaries. And even though the radical environmentalism behind it, of belief in a tabula rasa organism that can be built up into anything by rein-

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forcement has long been known to be questionable, given the biologically evolved aptic structuring of each organism, these principles still draw adherents into the hope of a new society based upon such control.

Of course these scientisms about man begin with something that is true. That nutrition can improve health both of mind and body is true. The class struggle as Marx studied it in the France of Louis Napoleon was a fact. The relief of hysterical symptoms in a few patients by analysis of sexual memories probably happened. And hungry animals or anxious men certainly will learn instrumental responses for food or approbation. These are true facts. But so is the shape of a liver of a sacrificed animal a true fact. And so the Ascendants and Midheavens of astrologers, or the shape of oil on water. Applied to the world as representative of all the world, facts become superstitions. A superstition is after all only a metaphier grown wild to serve a need to know. Like the entrails of animals or the flights of birds, such scientistic superstitions become the preserved ritualized places where we may read out the past and future of man, and hear the answers that can authorize our actions.

Science then, for all its pomp of factness, is not unlike some of the more easily disparaged outbreaks of pseudoreligions. In this period of transition from its religious basis, science often shares with the celestial maps of astrology, or a hundred other irrational-isms, the same nostalgia for the Final Answer, the One Truth, the Single Cause. In the frustrations and sweat of laboratories, it feels the same temptations to swarm into sects, even as did the Khabiru refugees, and set out here and there through the dry Sinais of parched fact for some rich and brave significance flowing with truth and exaltation. And all of this, my metaphor and all, is a part of this transitional period after the breakdown of the bicameral mind.

And this essay is no exception.

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Curiously, none of these contemporary movements tells us anything about what we are supposed to be like after the wrinkles in our nutrition have been ironed smooth, or “the withering away of the state” has occurred, or our libidos have been properly cathected, or the chaos of reinforcements has been made straight. Instead their allusion is mostly backward, telling us what has gone wrong, hinting of some cosmic disgrace, some earlier stunting of our potential. It is, I think, yet another characteristic of the religious form which such movements have taken over in the emptiness caused by the retreat of ecclesiastical certainty — that of a supposed fall of man.

This strange and, I think, spurious idea of a lost innocence takes its mark precisely in the breakdown of the bicameral mind as the first great conscious narratization of mankind. It is the song of the Assyrian psalms, the wail of the Hebrew hymns, the myth of Eden, the fundamental fall from divine favor that is the source and first premise of the world’s great religions. I interpret this hypothetical fall of man to be the groping of newly conscious men to narratize what has happened to them, the loss of divine voices and assurances in a chaos of human directive and selfish privacies.

We see this theme of lost certainty and splendor not only stated by all the religions of man throughout history, but also again and again even in nonreligious intellectual history. It is there from the reminiscence theory of the Platonic Dialogues, that everything new is really a recalling of a lost better world, all the way to Rousseau’s complaint of the corruption of natural man by the artificialities of civilization. And we see it also in the modern scientisms I have mentioned: in Marx’s assumption of a lost “social childhood of mankind where mankind unfolds in complete beauty,” so clearly stated in his earlier writings, an innocence corrupted by money, a paradise to be regained. Or in the Freudian emphasis on the deep-seatedness of neurosis in civilization and of dreadful primordial acts and wishes in both

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our racial and individual pasts; and by inference a previous innocence, quite unspecified, to which we return through psychoanalysis. Or in behaviorism, if less distinctly, in the undocumented faith that it is the chaotic reinforcements of development and the social process that must be controlled and ordered to return man to a quite unspecified ideal before these reinforcements had twisted his true nature awry.

I therefore believe that these and many other movements of our time are in the great long picture of our civilizations related to the loss of an earlier organization of human natures. They are attempts to return to what is no longer there, like poets to their inexistent Muses, and as such they are characteristic of these transitional millennia in which we are imbedded.

I do not mean that the individual thinker, the reader of this page or its writer, or Galileo or Marx, is so abject a creature as to have any conscious articulate willing to reach either the absolutes of gods or to return to a preconscious innocence. Such terms are meaningless applied to individual lives and removed from the larger context of history. It is only if we make generations our persons and centuries hours that the pattern is clear.

As individuals we are at the mercies of our own collective imperatives. We see over our everyday attentions, our gardens and politics, and children, into the forms of our culture darkly.

And our culture is our history. In our attempts to communicate or to persuade or simply interest others, we are using and moving about through cultural models among whose differences we may select, but from whose totality we cannot escape. And it is in this sense of the forms of appeal, of begetting hope or interest or appreciation or praise for ourselves or for our ideas, that our communications are shaped into these historical patterns, these grooves of persuasion which are even in the act of communication an inherent part of what is communicated. And this essay is no exception.

446 Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind in the Modern World No exception at all. It began in what seemed in my personal narratizations as an individual choice of a problem with which I have had an intense involvement for most of my life: the problem of the nature and origin of all this invisible country of touchless rememberings and unshowable reveries, this introcosm that is more myself than anything I can find in any mirror. But was this impulse to discover the source of consciousness what it appeared to me? The very notion of truth is a culturally given direction, a part of the pervasive nostalgia for an earlier certainty. The very idea of a universal stability, an eternal firmness of principle out there that can be sought for through the world as might an Arthurian knight for the Grail, is, in the morphology of history, a direct outgrowth of the search for lost gods in the first two millennia after the decline of the bicameral mind. What was then an augury for direction of action among the ruins of an archaic mentality is now the search for an innocence of certainty among the mythologies of facts.

AFTERWORD

I T IS NOW more than a decade since this essay first appeared in book form, and my publishers have encouraged me to add a post-script in which I might discuss the general reaction to this book as well as changes I might make if I were to rewrite it.

A favorite practice of some professional intellectuals when at first faced with a theory as large as the one I have presented is to search for that loose thread which, when pulled, will unravel all the rest.

And rightly so. It is part of the discipline of scientific thinking. In any work covering so much of the terrain of human nature and history, hustling into territories jealously guarded by myriad aggressive specialists, there are bound to be such errancies, sometimes of fact but I fear more often of tone. But that the knitting of this book is such that a tug on such a bad stitch will unravel all the rest is more of a hope on the part of the orthodox than a fact in the scientific pursuit of truth. The book is not a single hypothesis.

There are four main hypotheses in Books I and II. I welcome this opportunity to add some comments to each of them.

1. Consciousness is based on language. Such a statement is of course contradictory to the usual and I think superficial views of consciousness that are embedded both in popular belief and in language. But there can be no progress in the science of consciousness until careful distinctions have been made between what is introspectable and all the hosts of other neural abilities we have come to call cognition. Consciousness is not the same as cognition and should be sharply distinguished from it.

The most common error which I did not emphasize sufficiently is to confuse consciousness with perception. Recently, at a meeting of the Society for Philosophy and Psychology, a well-known and

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prestigious philosopher stood up to object vociferously on this point. Looking at me directly, he exclaimed, “I am perceiving you at this moment. Are you trying to say that I am not conscious of you at this moment?” A collective cognitive imperative in him was proclaiming in the affirmative. But actually he was being conscious of the rhetorical argument he was making. He could have better been conscious of me if he had turned away from me or had closed his eyes.

This type of confusion was at least encouraged back in 1921 by Bertrand Russell: “We are conscious of anything that we perceive.”1 And as his logical atomism became fashionable in philosophy, it became difficult to see it any other way. And in a later book Russell uses as an example of consciousness “I see a table.”2 But Descartes, who gave us the modern idea of consciousness, would never have agreed. Nor would a radical behaviorist like Watson, who in denying consciousness existed certainly did not mean sense perception.

Just as in the case I mentioned above, I suggest Russell was not being conscious of the table, but of the argument he was writing about. In my own notation, I would diagram the situation as

‘I’ -» (I see a table).

Russell thought his consciousness was the second term, but in reality it was the entire expression. He should have found a more ethologically valid example that was really true of his consciousness, that had really happened, such as, “I think I will rewrite the Principa now that Whitehead’s dead” or “How can I afford the alimony for another Lady Russell?” He would then have come to other conclusions. Such examples are consciousness in action.

“I see a table” is not.

Perception is sensing a stimulus and responding appropriately.

And this can happen on a nonconscious level, as I have tried to describe in driving a car. Another way to look at the problem is to 1 Bertrand Russell, Analysts of Mind (London: Allen and Unwin, 192-1).

2 Bertrand Russell, Philosophy (New York: Norton, 1927).

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remember the behavior of white blood cells, which certainly perceive bacteria and respond appropriately by devouring them. To equate consciousness with perception is thus tantamount to saying that we have six thousand conscious entities per cubic millimeter of blood whirling around in our circulatory system — which I think is a reductio ad absurdum.

Consciousness is not all language, but it is generated by it and accessed by it. And when we begin to untease the fine reticulation of how language generates consciousness we are on a very difficult level of theorizing. The primordial mechanisms by which this happens in history I have outlined briefly and then in II:5 tried to show how this worked out in the development of consciousness in Greece. Consciousness then becomes embedded in language and so is learned easily by children. The general rule is: there is no operation in consciousness that did not occur in behavior first.

To briefly review, if we refer to the circle triangle problem on page 40, in solving this struction we say, “I ‘see’ it’s a triangle,”

though of course we are not actually seeing anything. In the struction of finding how to express this solving of the problem, the metaphor of actual seeing pops into our minds. Perhaps there could be other metaphiers3 leading to a different texture of consciousness, but in Western culture ‘seeing’ and the other words with which we try to anchor mental events are indeed visual. And by using this word ‘see’, we bring with it its paraphiers, or associates of actual seeing.

In this way the spatial quality of the world around us is being driven into the psychological fact of solving a problem (which as we remember needs no consciousness). And it is this associated spatial quality that, as a result of the language we use to describe such psychological events, becomes with constant repetitions this 3 My friend W. V. Quine strenuously objects to my metaphrand-metaphier coinage because they are hybrids of Latin and Greek. I have opted to keep them however for their connotative association with multiplicand and multiplier. He has made the interesting suggestion that perhaps this distinction is related to the latent-manifest distinction of psychoanalysis. Are dreams metaphors? Is what Freud called the unconscious actually the latent metaphrand operated on by the manifest metaphier?

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functional space of our consciousness, or mind-space. Mind-space I regard as the primary feature of consciousness. It is the space which you preoptively are ‘introspecting on’ or ‘seeing’ at this very moment.

But who does the ‘seeing’? Who does the introspecting? Here we introduce analogy, which differs from metaphor in that the similarity is between relationships rather than between things or actions. As the body with its sense organs (referred to as I) is to physical seeing, so there develops automatically an analog ‘I’ to relate to this mental kind of ‘seeing’ in mind-space. The analog

‘I’ is the second most important feature of consciousness. It is not to be confused with the self, which is an object of consciousness in later development. The analog ‘I’ is contentless, related I think to Kant’s transcendental ego. As the bodily I can move about in its environment looking at this or that, so the analog ‘I’ learns to

‘move about’ in mind-space, ‘attending to’ or concentrating on one thing or another.

A l l the procedures of consciousness are based on such metaphors and analogies with behavior, constructing a careful matrix of considerable stability. And so we narratize the analogic simulation of actual behavior, an obvious aspect of consciousness which seems to have escaped previous synchronic discussions of consciousness.

Consciousness is constantly fitting things into a story, putting a before and an after around any event. This feature is an analog of our physical selves moving about through a physical world with its spatial successiveness which becomes the successiveness of time in mind-space. And this results in the conscious conception of time which is a spatialized time in which we locate events and indeed our lives. It is impossible to be conscious of time in any other way than as a space.

The basic connotative definition of consciousness is thus an analog ‘I’ narratizing in a functional mind-space. The denotative definition is, as it was for Descartes, Locke, and Hume, what is introspectable.

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My list of features is not meant to be exhaustive or exclusive.

Nor are they meant to be universal aspects of consciousness everywhere. Given the great cultural differences in the world today, just as in the world’s past, it seems to me unreasonable to think that the features and emphases of consciousness would be everywhere the same.

As it stands, the list I have given is I think incomplete. At least two other features should be added: concentration, which is the analog of sensory attention,4 and suppression, by which we stop being conscious of annoying thoughts, the behavioral analog of repug-nance, disgust, or simply turning away from annoyances in the physical world.

I would also take this opportunity of commenting on what is called in this book conciliation or compatibilization, which have perplexed some readers. At the risk of even more confusion, I would change this word to consilience, which is Whewell’s better term for my intended meaning of mental processes that make things compatible with each other.5 While this is not so obvious in waking life, it becomes extremely important in dreams. Originally, I had written two chapters on dreams to go in the present volume, but my publishers suggested that because of the length of the book, it seemed more reasonable to save them for the next volume, which I hope will appear in several years.6

Psychologists are sometimes justly accused of the habit of re-inventing the wheel and making it square and then calling it a first approximation. I would demur from agreement that that is true in the development that I have just outlined, but I would indeed like to call it a first approximation. Consciousness is not a simple 4 It would be interesting to see experimentally if training in accurate and fast attention resulted in better concentration in tasks when tested with distraction.

5 William Whewell, Theory of Scientific Method (1858), ed. R. E. Butts (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1968).

6 For readers who would like an abstract of how this theory translates into dreams, I would suggest that they read my Bauer Symposium lecture in Canadian Psychology, 1986, 27:128-182, particularly pages 146 and 147.

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matter and it should not be spoken of as if it were. Nor have I mentioned the different modes of conscious narratization such as verbal (having imaginary conversations — certainly the most common mode in myself), perceptual (imagining scenes), behavioral (imagining ourselves doing something), physiological (monitoring our fatigue or discomfort or appetite), or musical (imagining music), all of which seem quite distinct, with properties of their own. Such modes have obviously different neural substrates, indicating the complexity of any possible neurology of consciousness.

2. The bicameral mind. The second main hypothesis is that preceding consciousness there was a different mentality based on verbal hallucinations. For this I think the evidence is overwhelming. Wherever we look in antiquity, there is some kind of evidence that supports it, either in literary texts or in archeological artifacts.

Apart from this theory, why are there gods? Why religions?

Why does all ancient literature seem to be about gods and usually heard from gods?

And why do we have verbal hallucinations at all? Before the publication of this book, verbal hallucinations were not paid much attention to, except as the primary indicator of schizophrenia. But since that time, a flurry of studies have shown that the incidence of verbal hallucinations is far more widespread than was thought previously. Roughly one third of normal people hear hallucinated voices at some time. Children hear voices from their imaginary or we should say hallucinated playmates. It has recently been discovered that congenital quadriplegics who have never in their lives spoken or moved, and are often regarded as “vegetables,“ not only understand language perfectly but also hear voices they regard as God.7 The importance I put on these studies taken together is that they clearly indicate to me that there is a genetic 7 John Hamilton, “Auditory Hallucinations in Nonverbal Quadriplegics,” Psychiatry, 1985, 48’.382-392. For other work on verbal hallucinations, see my “Verbal Hallucinations and Preconscious Mentality,” in Manfred Spitzer and Brendan H. Maher, eds., Philosophy and Psychofathology (New York: Springer Verlag, 1990), pp. 157-170.

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basis for such hallucinations in us all, and that it was probably evolved into the human genome back in the late Pleistocene, and then became the basis for the bicameral mind.

3. The dating. The third general hypothesis is that consciousness was learned only after the breakdown of the bicameral mind.

I believe this is true, that the anguish of not knowing what to do in the chaos resulting from the loss of the gods provided the social conditions that could result in the invention of a new mentality to replace the old one.

But actually there are two possibilities here. A weak form of the theory would state that, yes, consciousness is based on language, but instead of its being so recent, it began back at the beginning of language, perhaps even before civilization, say, about 12,000 B.C., at about the time of the beginning of the bicameral mentality of hearing voices. Both systems of mind then could have gone on together until the bicameral mind became unwieldy and was sloughed off, leaving consciousness on its own as the medium of human decisions. This is an extremely weak position because it could then explain almost anything and is almost undisprovable.

The strong form is of greater interest and is as I have stated it in introducing the concept of the bicameral mind. It sets an astonishingly recent date for the introduction into the world of this remarkable privacy of covert events which we call consciousness. The date is slightly different in different parts of the world, but in the Middle East, where bicameral civilization began, the date is roughly 1000 B.C.

This dating I think can be seen in the evidence from Mesopotamia, where the breakdown of the bicameral mind, beginning about 1200 B.C., is quite clear. It was due to chaotic social disorganizations, to overpopulation, and probably to the success of writing in replacing the auditory mode of command. This breakdown resulted in many practices we would now call religious which were efforts to return to the lost voices of the gods, e.g., prayer,

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religious worship, and particularly the many types of divination I have described, which are new ways of making decisions by supposedly returning to the directions of gods by simple analogy.

I would not now make as much of the Thera explosion as I did in II.3. But that it did cause the disruption of theocracy in the Near East and hence the conditions for the learning of a non-hallucinatory mentality is I think valid. But in the general case, I would rather emphasize that the success of a theocratic agricultural civilization brings with it overpopulation and thus the seeds of its own breakdown. This is suggested at least among the civilizations of Mesoamerica, where the relative rapidity of the rise and fall of civilizations with the consequent desertion of temple complexes contrasts with the millennia-long civilizations in the older parts of the world.

But is this consciousness or the concept of consciousness? This is the well-known use-mention criticism which has been applied to Hobbes and others as well as to the present theory. Are we not confusing here the concept of consciousness with consciousness itself? My reply is that we are fusing them, that they are the same. As Dan Dennett has pointed out in a recent discussion of the theory,8 there are many instances of mention and use being identical. The concept of baseball and baseball are the same thing. Or of money, or law, or good and evil. Or the concept of this book.

4. The double brain. When in any discussion or even in our thinking we can use spatial terms, as in “locating” a problem or

“situating” a difficulty in an argument, as if everything in existence were spread out like land before us, we seem to get a feeling of clarity. This pseudo-clarity, as it should be called, is because of the spatial nature of consciousness. So in locating functions in different parts of the brain we seem to get an extra surge of clarity about them — justified or not.

At the time I was writing that part of the book in the 1960s, 8 Daniel Dennett, “Julian Jaynes” Software Archeology,” Canadian Psychology, 1986, 27:149-154.

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there was little interest in the right hemisphere. Even as late as 1964, some leading neuroscientists were saying that the right hemisphere did nothing, suggesting it was like a spare tire. But since then we have seen an explosion of findings about right hemisphere function, leading, I am afraid, to a popularization that verges on some of the shrill excesses of similar discussions of asymmetrical hemisphere function in the latter part of the nineteenth century9 and also in the twentieth century.10

But the main results, even conservatively treated, are generally in agreement with what we might expect to find in the right hemisphere on the basis of the bicameral hypothesis. The most significant such finding is that the right hemisphere is the hemisphere which processes information in a synthetic manner. It is now well known from even more studies that the right hemisphere is far superior to the left in fitting together block designs (Kohs Block Design Test), parts of faces, or musical chords,11 and such synthetic functions were indeed those of the admonitory gods in fitting together civilizations.

The reader has by now guessed that a somewhat crucial experiment is possible. Since I have supposed that the verbal hallucinations heard by schizophrenics and others are similar to those once heard by bicameral people, could we not test out this cerebral location in the right temporal lobe of the voices by one of the new brain imaging techniques, using patients as they are hallucinating?

This has recently been tried using cerebral glucography with posi-tron tomography, a very difficult procedure. Indeed, the results demonstrated that there was more glucose uptake (showing more 9 Anne Harrington, “Nineteenth Century Ideas on Hemisphere Differences and

‘Duality of Mind,’ ” Behavioural and Brain Sciences, 1985, 8:5 17—659, or her excellent enlarged study, Medicine, Mind, and the Double Brain (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987).

10 S. J. Segalowitz, Two Sides of the Brain (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1983).

11 M. P. Bryden, Laterality: Functional Asymmetry in the Intact Brain (New York: Academic Press, 1982).

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activity) in the right temporal lobe when the patient was hearing voices.12

I wish to emphasize that these four hypotheses are separable.

The last, for example, could be mistaken (at least in the simplified version I have presented) and the others true. The two hemispheres of the brain are not the bicameral mind but its present neurological model. The bicameral mind is an ancient mentality demonstrated in the literature and artifacts of antiquity.

The last line of Book III sounds indeed like a ponderous finality of judgment. It is. But it is also the beginning, the opening up of human nature as we know it and feel it profoundly because consciously in ourselves, with all its vicissitudes, clarities, and obscurities. Because of the documentation, we can see this most clearly in Greece in the first half of the first millennium B.C., where the change can truly be called

The Cognitive Explosion.

With consciousness comes an increased importance of the spatialization of time and new words for that spatialization, like chronos. But that is to put it too mildly. It is a cognitive explosion with the interaction of consciousness and the rest of cognition producing new abilities. Whereas bicameral beings knew what followed what and where they were, and had behavioral expectancies and sensory recognitions just as all mammals do, now conscious, humans can ‘look’ into an imagined future with all its potential of terror, joy, hope, or ambition, just as if it were already real, and into a past moody with what might have been, or savoring what did, the past emerging through the metaphier of a space through 12 M. S. Buchsbaum, D. H. Ingvar, R. Kessler, R. N. Waters, J. Cappelletti, D. P.

van Kammen, A. C. King, J. L. Johnson, R. G. Manning, R. W. Flynn, L. S. Mann, W. E. Bunney, and L. Sokoloff, “Cerebral Glucography with Positron Tomography: Use in Normal Subjects and in Patients with Schizophrenia,” Archives of General Psychiatry, 1982, 39:251-259.

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whose long shadows we may move in a new and magical process called remembrance or reminiscence.

Reminiscent memory (or episodic memory, as it is sometimes called),13 in sharp contrast to habit retention (or semantic memory), is new to the world with consciousness. And because a physical space in the world can always be returned to, so we feel irrationally, somehow certain, impossibly certain, that we should be able to return again to some often unfinished relationship, some childhood scene or situation or regretted outburst of love or temper or to undo some tragic chance action back in the imagined inexistent space of the past.

We thus have conscious lives and lifetimes and can peer through the murk of tomorrow toward our own dying. With the prodding of Heraclitus in the sixth century B.C.,14 we invent new words or really modifications of old words to name processes or symbolize actions over time by adding the suffix sis and so be conscious of them, words in Greek like gnosis, a knowing; genesis, a beginning; emphasis, a showing in; analysis, a loosening up; or particularly phronesis, which is variously translated as intellection, thinking, understanding, or consciousness. These words and the processes they refer to are new in the sixth and seventh centuries B.C.15

The Self

Along this new lifetime, putting together similar occurrences or excerpts of them — inferences from what others tell us we are and from what we can tell ourselves on the basis of our own conscious-13 Endel Tulving, Elements of Episodic Memory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983).

14 Howard Jones, “-Sis Nouns in Heraclitus,” Museum Africum, 1974, 3:1-13. I am grateful to Professor Jones for discussion on this point.

15 This has been noted and emphasized by several classical scholars including Bruno Snell, speaking of “a new ‘mental’ concord that apparently was not possible before the seventh century when a new dimension of the intellect is opened.” Cited by Joseph Russo in “The Inner Man in Archilochus and the Odyssey,” Greek, Roman, and Byzan-tine Studies, 1974, 25:139, n. 1, who prefers an earlier date for this transformation, as his title indicates.

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ness of what we have done — we come to construct or invent, on a continuing basis, in ourselves and in others, a self. The advantage of an idea of your self is to help you know what you can or can’t do or should or should not do. Bicameral individuals had stable identities, names to which they or others could attach epithets, but such verbal identity is a far shallower form of behavior than the consciously constructed although variable, fragile, and defensive self that shakily pilots us through the alternatives of living consciously.

Particularly with regard to the self, but also in all of the treacherous terminology of mind, we must beware of the perils of poly-semy or homonymic or multireferential confusion, as I have called it elsewhere. This results from the historical growth and inner alterations of most mental terms; the referrent of a term changes usually with the addition of new conscious referrents until the term is really multireferential. “Self“ is a good example. Originally, the word (or corresponding word in whatever language) probably was simply used as an identity marker as in all its many compounds: self-employed, self-discipline, etc. Or as when we say a fly washes itself. But with the fractal-like proliferation and inten-sification of consciousness through history, particularly since the twelfth century A.D., a very different referrent of “self“ came into existence. It is the answer to the question “Who am I ? ” Most social psychologists accept that denotation of self.

Thus, as John Locke somewhere says,16 if we cut off a finger, we have not diminished the self. The body is not the self. An early critic of my book pointed to the well-known fact that mirrors were used far back into antiquity17 and therefore such ancient 16 But see Locke’s profoundly modern discussion in Essay on the Human Understanding, II:10-29.

17 Exactly the significance of such mirrors is a question. In the archeological museum in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, I have seen an ancient tombstone with the outline of a lady holding such a mirror. Would this be vanity? Were mirrors hand idols which were common in bicameral Mesopotamia? The mystery of the use of mirrors in Mayan iconography should also be noted, as it usually represents a god or the brightness of a god. See Linda Schele and Mary Ellen Miller, The Blood of Kings (Fort Worth: Kimbell Art Museum, 1986).

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peoples were conscious. But we don’t see our selves in mirrors, although we say so; we see our faces. The face is not the self.

Because of the importance of this confusion and its frequency in misunderstanding my book, I would like here to describe a few other studies briefly. When presented with mirrors, most fish, birds, or mammals react with complete disinterest or else engage in social or aggressive displays or attack their mirror images. But humans and chimpanzees are different: they like mirrors. Human children go through four stages of behavior with respect to their mirror images. At first there is little reaction, then smiling, touching, vocalizing as if it were another child, then a stage of testing or repetitive activity while observing the mirror image intently, and then, when the child is almost two years old, the adult reaction to the image as if it were its own.18 The test for this final stage has been to smear rouge on the child’s nose and then have the child look in a mirror and see if the child touches its nose — which it readily does by age two.19

But the real interest in this phenomenon began when Gallup showed that the same effect could be obtained with chimpanzees.20

Chimpanzees after extensive experience with mirrors were put under deep anesthesia. Then a conspicuous spot of red dye was daubed on the brow or top half of an ear. Upon awakening, the chimpanzees paid no attention to the markings, showing that no local tactile stimulation was present. But when a mirror was provided, the chimpanzees, who by now were very familiar with their mirror images, immediately reached for the color spot to rub or pick it off, showing they knew the mirror images of themselves.

Other chimpanzees that had had no experience with mirrors did not react in this way. Hence it was claimed that chimpanzees have selves and self-recognition. Or, in the words of one of the major 18 J. C. Dixon, “Development of Self-recognition,” Journal of Genetic Psychology, 1957, 91:251-256.

19 B. K. Amsterdam, “Mirror Self-image Reactions Before Age Two,” Developmental Psychobiology, 1972, 5:297-305.

20 G. G. Gallup, “Chimpanzees: Self-recognition,” Science, 1970, 167-.86-87.

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senior figures in animal behavior, “the results provide clear evidence of self-awareness in chimpanzees.”21

This conclusion is incorrect. Self-awareness usually means the consciousness of our own persona over time, a sense of who we are, our hopes and fears, as we daydream about ourselves in relation to others. We do not see our conscious selves in mirrors, even though that image may become the emblem of the self in many cases. The chimpanzees in this experiment and the two-year-old child learned a point-to-point relation between a mirror image and the body, wonderful as that is. Rubbing a spot noticed in the mirror is not essentially different from rubbing a spot noticed on the body without a mirror. The animal is not shown to be imagining himself anywhere else, or thinking of his life over time, or introspecting in any sense — all signs of a conscious self.

This less interesting, more primitive interpretation was made even clearer by an ingenious experiment done in Skinner’s laboratory.22 Essentially the same paradigm was followed with pigeons, except that it required a series of specific trainings with the mirror, whereas the chimpanzee or child in the earlier experiments was, of course, self-trained. But after about fifteen hours of such training when the contingencies were carefully controlled, it was found that a pigeon also could use a mirror to locate a blue spot on its body which it could not see directly, though it had never been explicitly trained to do so. I do not think that a pigeon because it can be so trained has a self-concept.

From Affect to Emotion

The new spatialized time in which events and experiences could be located, remembered, and anticipated results not only in the 21 Donald R. Griffin, “Prospects for a Cognitive Ethology,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 1978, 4: 52 7-5 3 8.

22 Robert Epstein, R. P. Lanza and B. F. Skinner, “ ‘Self awareness’ in the Pigeon,”

Science, 1981, 212:695-696.

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conscious construction of a self, but also in a dramatic alteration of our emotions. We share with other mammals a not very orderly repertoire of affects whose neural substrate was evolved long ago by natural selection into the limbic system deep in the brain. I wish here to mention three: fear, shame, and mating. And in doing so I wish to forewarn the reader that terminology is again a problem, particularly in this area — even the word affect, which I do not like to use because it is so often confused with effect and sounds strange to the nonprofessional. By affect, psychology means to designate a biologically organized behavior that has a specific anatomical expression and a specific biochemistry, one that dissipates with time. But with consciousness, all this is changed.

I shall call this consciousness of a past or future affect an emotion, as that is how we describe it. And what I am proposing here is a two-tiered theory of emotions for modern human beings as distinguished from bicameral man and other animals.23 There are the basic affects of mammalian life and then our emotions, which are the consciousness of such affects located inside an identity in a lifetime, past or future, and which, be it noted, have no biologically evolved mechanisms of stopping.

From Fear to Anxiety

In fear, there are a class of stimuli, usually abrupt and men-acing, which stop the animal or person from ongoing behavior, provoke flight, and in most social mammals produce specific bodily expressions and internally a rise in the level of catecholamines in the blood, such as adrenalin and noradrenalin. This is the well-known emergency response, which dissipates after a few minutes if the frightening object or situation is removed.

But with consciousness in a modern human being, when we 23 Julian Jaynes, “A Two-tiered Theory of Emotions,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 1982, 5:434-435, and also “Sensory Pain and Conscious Pain,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 1985,, 8:161-63.

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reminisce about previous fears or imagine future ones, fear becomes mixed with the feeling of anxiety. If we wish to make echoes here of the James-Lange theory of the emotions, we would call anxiety the knowledge of our fear. We see a bear, run away in fear, and have anxiety. But anxiety as a rehearsal of actual fear partially occasions the emergency response at least weakly. It is man’s new capacity for conscious imagery that can keep an analog of the frightening situation in consciousness with a continuing response to it. And how to turn off this response with its biochemical basis was and I think still is a problem for conscious human beings, particularly with the resulting increase in catecholamine levels and all its long-term effects. I would ask you here to consider what it was like for an individual back in the first millennium B.C. to have these anxieties that did not have their own built-in mechanism of cessation and before human beings learned conscious mechanisms of thought for doing so.

This is demonstrated in the famous incident described by Herodotus of the very first tragedy performed in Athens. It was performed only once. The play was The Fall of Miletus by Phrynicus, describing the sack of that Ionian city by the Persians in 494 B.C., a disaster that had happened the previous year. The reaction of the audience was so extreme that all Athens could not function for several days. Phrynicus was banished, never to be heard of again, and his tragedy burnt.

From Shame to Guilt

The second biological affect I wish to consider here is shame.

Because it is a socially evoked affect, it has rarely been studied experimentally, in either animals or humans. It is a complicated affect whose occasioning stimuli often have to do with maintaining hierarchical relationships in highly social animals, and is the submissive response to rejection by the hierarchical group. While such biological shame is apparent as a controlling mechanism in

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carnivore groups, it is much more obvious among the primates, and particularly in human beings. We seem to be ashamed to talk about shame, and, indeed, as adults, we have been so shaped by shame in the past, so confined to a narrow band of socially acceptable behavior, that it is rarely occasioned.

But when we think back to our childhoods, the piercing, throbbing trauma of being rejected by our peer groups, the fear of inappropriately crossing over from the private domain into the public countenance, the agony when we do, particularly in relation to sexual and excretory functions, toilet accidents of others or ourselves, but also in a milder form, in wanting to be dressed the same as other children, to receive as many valentines, and to be promoted with the rest, or have parents equal in wealth, health, or promise to the parents of others, or not to be beaten up or teased by others, sometimes even to be average in schoolwork when one is really superior — anything to be sure that one is snugly sunk deeply into one’s cohort — these are some of the most powerful and profound influences on our development. We should remember here that as we grow older, our cohort is less and less our immediate peer group and more and more our family tradition, race, religion, union, or profession, et cetera.

The physiological expression of shame or humiliation involves of course blushing, dropping of the eyes and of the head, and the behavioral one of simply hiding from the group. Unfortunately, nothing is known about its biochemical or neurological basis.

If you wish to feel shame in its pure form, this stepping outside what is expected of you, simply stand out in a busy street and shout out the time in minutes and seconds over the heads of everyone who passes by, and do it for five minutes — or until you are taken away. This is shame, but not guilt, because you have done nothing your society has taught you to call wrong.

And now consider what conscious reminiscence and imagery of the future bring to this affect. And particularly consider this in the milieu of ethical right and wrong that developed as markers

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for behavior after the breakdown of the bicameral mind with its certainty of gods’ directives. Wrongs, or by another word, sins, or indeed anything that would eject us from society if it were known or seem to eject us from society can be reminisced about out of the past and worried about for the future. And this we call guilt. No one before 1ooo B.C. ever felt guilt, even while shame was the way groups and societies were held together.

To indicate the evidence that guilt as opposed to shame is a new emotion at this time, I would cite a single bit of evidence, and one that is well known.24 This is the story of Oedipus. It is referred to in two lines of the Iliad and two lines in the Odyssey which I think we can take as indicating the true story, as it came down from bicameral times. The story seems to be about a man who killed his father and then unwittingly married his mother and so became King of Thebes, proceeding to have several children-siblings by his mother, then discovering what he had done, certainly feeling shame since incest had always been a taboo, but evidently recovering from that shame, living a happy life thereafter with his wife-mother, and dying with royal honors sometime later. This was written down around 800 B.C., but the story comes from several centuries before that.

And then, only four hundred years later, we have the great trilogy of Sophocles on the subject, a play about unknown guilt, guilt so extreme that a whole city is in famine because of it, so convulsive that the culprit when he discovers his guilt is not worthy to look upon the world again and stabs his eyes into darkness with the brooches clutched from his mother-wife’s breasts, and is led away by his sister-daughters into a mystical death at Colonus.

And again, there is no biological mechanism for getting rid of guilt. How to get rid of guilt is a problem which a host of learned social rituals of reacceptance are now developed: scapegoat ceremonies among the Hebrews (the word for sending away translates 24 E. R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1951).

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now as “forgiveness”), the similar pharmakos among the Greeks (again the word aphesis for sending the pharmakos away becomes the Greek for “forgiveness”), “purification” ceremonies of many sorts, baptism, the taurobolium, the haj, confession, the tashlik, the mass, and of course the Christian cross, which takes away the sins of the world (note the metaphors and analogies in all this). Even changing the nature of God to a forgiving father.

And I would also have you note here that while the affects are usually discrete, and evoked in very specific kinds of situations for specific kinds of responses, the emotions in consciousness are not discrete, can meld and evoke each other. Pve just said that in guilt we can have worry about future shameful experiences, which indeed is anxiety, and we thus have two emotions, anxiety and guilt, coming together as an even more powerful emotion.

From Mating to “Sex”

The third example I would consider here is the affect of mating.

It is similar in some respects to other affects but in other ways quite distinct. Animal studies show that mating, contrary to what the popular mind thinks, is not a necessary drive that builds up like hunger or thirst (although it seems so because of consciousness), but an elaborate behavior pattern waiting to be triggered off by very specific stimuli. Mating in most animals is thus confined to certain appropriate times of the year or day as well as to certain appropriate sets of stimuli as in another’s behavior, or pheromones, light conditions, privacy, security, and many other variables. These include the enormous variety of extremely complicated courtship procedures that for rather subtle evolutionary advantages seem in many animals almost designed to prevent mating rather than to encourage it, as one might expect from an oversimplified idea of the workings of natural selection. Among the anthropoid apes, in contrast to other primates, mating is so rare in the natural habitat as to have baffled early ethologists as to

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how these most human-like species reproduced at all. So too perhaps with bicameral man.

But when human beings can be conscious about their mating behavior, can reminisce about it in the past and imagine it in the future, we are in a very different world, indeed, one that seems more familiar to us. Try to imagine what your “sexual life” would be if you could not fantasize about sex.

What is the evidence for this change? Scholars of the ancient world, I think, would agree that the murals and sculptures of what I’m calling the bicameral world, that is, before 1ooo B.C., are chaste; depictions with sexual references are scarcely existent, although there are exceptions. The modest, innocent murals from bicameral Thera now on the second floor of the National Museum in Athens are good examples.

But with the coming of consciousness, particularly in Greece, where the evidence is most clear, the remains of these early Greek societies are anything but chaste.25 Beginning with seventh century B.C. vase paintings, with the depictions of ithyphallic satyrs, new, semidivine beings, sex seems indeed a prominent concern.

And I mean to use the word concern, for it does not at first seem to be simply pornographic excitement. For example, on one island in the Aegean, Delos, is a temple of huge phallic erections.

Boundary stones all over Attica were in the form of what are called herms: square stone posts about four feet high, topped with a sculptured head usually of Hermes and, at the appropriate height, the only other sculptured feature of the post, a penile erection. Not only were these herms not laughter-producing, as they certainly would be to children of today, they were regarded as serious and important, since in Plato’s Symposium “the mutila-tion of the herms” by the drunken general Alcibiades, in which he evidently knocked off these protuberances with his sword around the city of Athens, is regarded as a sacrilege.

25 Mos t of this informatio n and references can be foun d in Hans Licht , Sexual Life in Ancient Greece (London: Routledge, 1 9 3 1 ) , or in G. Rattray T a y l o r , Sex in History ( N e w Y o r k : Vanguard Press, 1 9 5 4 ) .

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Erect phalli of stone or other material have been found in large numbers in the course of excavations. There were amulets of phalli. Vase paintings show naked female dancers swinging a phallus in a Dionysian cult. One inscription describes the measures to be taken even in times of war to make sure that the phallus procession should be led safely into the city. Colonies were obliged to send phalli to Athens for the great Dionysian festivals. Even Aristotle refers to phallic farces or satyr plays which generally followed the ritual performances of the great tragedies.

If this were all, we might be able to agree with older Victorian interpretations that this phallicism was merely an objective fertility rite. But the evidence from actual sexual behavior following the advent of conscious fantasy speaks otherwise. Brothels, supposedly instituted by Solon, were everywhere and of every kind by the fourth century B.C. Vase paintings depict every possible sexual behavior from masturbation to bestiality to human three-somes, as well as homosexuality in every possible form.

The latter indeed began only at this time, due, I suggest, in part to the new human ability to fantasize. Homosexuality is utterly absent from the Homeric poems. This is contrary to what some recent Freudian interpretations and even classical references of this period (particularly after its proscription by Plato in The Laws as being contrary to physis, or nature), seeking authorization for homosexuality in Homer, having projected into the strong bond-ing between Achilles and Patroclus.

And again I would have you consider the problem twenty-five hundred years ago, when human beings were first conscious and could first fantasize about sex, of how they learned to control sexual behavior to achieve a stable society. Particularly because erec-tile tissue in the male is more prominent than in the female, and that feedback from even partial erections would promote the continuance of sexual fantasy (a process called recruitment), we might expect that this was much more of a male problem than a female one. Perhaps the social customs that came into being for such control resulted in the greater social separation of the sexes (which

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was certainly obvious by the time of Plato) as well as an enhanced male dominance. We can think of modern orthodox Muslim societies in this respect, in which an exposed female ankle or lock of hair is punishable by law.

I certainly will admit that there are large vacant places in the evidence for what I am saying. And of course there are other affects, like anger becoming our hatred, or more positive ones like excitement with the magical touch of consciousness becoming joy, or affiliation consciousized into love. I have chosen anxiety, guilt, and sex as the most socially important. Readers of a Freudian persuasion will note that their theorizing could begin here. I hope that these hypotheses can provide historians more competent than myself with a new way of looking at this extremely important period of human history, when so much of what we regard as modern psychology and personality was being formed for the first time.

There is so much more to do, so many more bays and inlets of history and theory to explore. The tracking of ancient mentalities is an ongoing process that is leading to new insights and discoveries. Since I do not know Chinese, I could not address that part of the data in the book. But I am pleased that my associate Michael Carr, an expert in ancient Chinese texts, is making up for that lack in a series of definitive papers.26 The dating here is approximately the same as in Greece, which has led some historians to call this period the “axial age.”

Several scholars have explored the ramifications of the theory in literature, particularly Judith Weissman, whose book with the working title of Vision, Madness, and Morality, Poetry and the Theory of the Bicameral Mind is being completed as I am writing.27 Thomas Posey is continuing his studies of verbal halluci-26 Michael Carr, “Sidelights on Xin ‘Heart, Mind’ in the Shijing abstract in Proceedings of the 31st CISHAAN, Tokyo and Kyoto, 1983, 824-825, and his “Persona-tion of the Dead in Ancient China,” Computational Analyses of Asian and African Languages, 1985, 1-107.

27 The title also of one of her papers: “Vision, Madness, and Morality: Poetry and

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nations, Ross Maxwell is doing further historical studies, and many others, such as D. C. Stove,28 I also thank for their support and encouragement,

P R I N C E T O N U N I V E R S I T Y , 1 9 9 0

the Theory of the Bicameral Mind,” Georgia Review, 1979, 35:118-158. See also her “Somewhere in Earshot: Yeats’ Admonitory Gods,” Pequod, 1982, 74:16-31.

28 D. C. Stove, “The Oracles and Their Cessation: A Tribute to Julian Jaynes,”

Encounter, April 1989, pp. 30-38.

THE D R A W I N G S

On pages 40, 101, 104, 120 by the author; on page 142 by Christiane Gillièron after a photograph by J. Perrot; on page 152 from J. Mellaart, Earliest Civilizations of the Near East (London: Thames and Hudson, 1 9 6 5 ) ; on page 154 by kind permission of Ekrem A k u r g a l ; on page 168

after Mellaart; on pages 170, 1 7 1 , 224 by Susan Hockaday; on page 199

by Carol Goldenberg; on page 172 by kind permission of Francis Robicsek; on page 192 redrawn from Henri Frankfort, Kingship and the Gods (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1 9 4 8 ) .

T h e lines of verse on page 378 are from William Empson’s “Doctrinal Point” and “ T h e Last Pain,” in Collected Poems of William Empson.

Reprinted by permission of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

Julian Jaynes was born in West Newton, Massachusetts, in 1920.

He attended Harvard University and received his bachelors degree from McGill University and his master’s and doctoral degrees in psychology from Yale University. Dr. Jaynes lectured in the psychology department at Princeton University from 1966 to 1990.

He published articles widely, focusing during the early part of his career on the study of animal behavior. He later redirected the scope of his thinking and energy to the study of human consciousness, culminating in his groundbreaking and only published book, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, which was nominated for the National Book Award in 1978. The book is considered by many to be one of the most significant and controversial books of the twentieth century. Dr. Jaynes suffered a fatal stroke on November 21,1997.

At the heart of this seminal work is the revolutionary idea that human consciousness did not begin far back in animal evolution but was a learned process that emerged, through cataclysm and catastrophe, from a hallucinatory mentality only three thousand years ago and that is still developing.

T h e implications of this scientific paradigm extend into virtually every aspect of our psychology, our history, our culture, our religion — indeed our future. In the words of one reviewer, it is “a humbling text, the kind that reminds most of us who make our livings through thinking, how much thinking there is left to do.”

“ W h e n Julian Jaynes . . . speculates that until late in the second millennium B.C. men had no consciousness but were automatically obeying the voices of gods, we are astounded but compelled to follow this remarkable thesis through all the corroborative evidence.” — John Updike, The New Yorker

“ T h i s b o o k s and this mans ideas may be the most influential, not to say controversial, of the second half of the twentieth century. It renders whole shelves of books obsolete.” — William Harrington, Columbus Dispatch

“Having just finished The Origin of Consciousness, I myself feel something like Keats’ Cortez staring at the Pacific, or at least like the early reviewers of D a r w i n or Freud. I’m not quite sure what to make of this new territory; but its expanse lies before me and I am startled by its power.”

— Edward Profitt, Commonweal

“ H e is as startling as Freud was in The Interpretation of D r e a m s , and Jaynes is e q u a l l y a d e p t at f o r c i n g a new view of k n o w n h u m a n b e h a v i o r . ”

— Raymond Headlee, American Journal of Psychiatry

“ T h e weight of original thought in [this book] is so great that it makes me uneasy for the author’s well-being: the human mind is not built to support such a b u r d e n . ” — D. C. Stove, Encounter I S B N - 1 3 : 9 7 8 - 0 - 6 1 8 - 0 5 7 0 7 - 8

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Document Outline

TITLE

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION-The Problem of Consciousness

BOOK I- The Mind of Man

1 The Consciousness of Consciousness

2 Consciousness

3 The Mind of Iliad

4 The Bicameral Mind

5 The Double Brain

6 The Origin of Civilization

BOOK II- The Witness of History

1 Gods, Graves, and Idols

2 Literate Bicameral Theocracies

3 The Causes of Consciousness

4 A Change of Mind in Mesopotamia

5 The Intellectual Consciousness of Greece

6 The Moral Consciousness of the Khabiru

BOOK III- Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind in the Modern World

1 The Quest for Authorization

2 Of Prophets and Possession

3 Of Poetry and Music

4 Hypnosis

5 Schizophrenia

6 The Auguries of Science

AFTERWORD

THE DRAWINGS

AUTHOR