Our Minds Are No Longer Ours

In his seminal version and vision of the evolution of human psychology, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1976), Julian Jaynes argues that even well into the Bronze Age, and beyond, human beings interpreted the “voices” in their heads as the voices of the gods or demigods—as the utterances of external forces penetrating the skull. The metacognitive idea of a mostly coherent, self-contained self, with an I-voice, Jaynes argues, happens very late—the product of technologies, norms, philosophy, literature: a barely stable concept of a stable self. The fractured, schizophrenic mind of early civilization, which gives names to its different impulses and talks to itself like it were talking to the divine, is never far away; it is more natural, perhaps, than the name-surname, therapy chair self which understands mental chatter as purely native to itself.