Julian Jaynes Quotes

American psychologist (1920–1997)

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Julian Jaynes (27 February 1920 – 21 November 1997) was an American psychologist, best known for his book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1976), in which he argued that ancient peoples were not conscious.

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I am emphasizing individuals set apartfrom others as ill, because, according to our theory, we could say that before the second millennium B.C., everyone was schizophrenic.

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.

There is no such thing as a complete consciousness.

Poetry, from describing external events objectively, is becoming subjectified into a poetry of personal conscious expression.

Memory is the medium of the must-have-been.

The central assertion of this view, I repeat, is that each new stage of words literally created new perceptions and attentions, and such new perceptions and attentions resulted in important cultural changes which are reflected in the archaeological record.

The vestiges of the bicameral mind do not exist in any empty psychological space.

Our sense of justice depends on our sense of time. Justice is a phenomenon only of consciousness, because time spread out in a spatial succession is its very essence.

We are greatly in need of specific research in this area of schizophrenic experience to help us understand Mesolithic man.

We can only know in the nervous system what we have known in behavior first.

I shall state my thesis plain. The first poets were gods. Poetry began with the bicameral mind.

Subjective conscious mind is an analog of what is called the real world. It is built up with a vocabulary or lexical field whose terms are all metaphors or analogs of behavior in the physical world. Its reality is of the same order as mathematics. It allows us to shortcut behavioral processes and arrive at more adequate decisions. Like mathematics, it is an operator rather than a thing or repository. And it is intimately bound up with volition and decision.