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