I've begun reading this. It is so far a fascinating history where Claxton begins tracing the origins of our current view of mind. He suggests that the origins of the unconscious lie in an attempt to explain oddities in human experience. He refers to Julian Jaynes, a Princeton psychologist who described the brains of the ancients as being 'bicameral'. By this he means that the brain had two chambers, one which heard voices and one which generated them. I don't know how he knows this...the basis for this hypothesis isn't discussed but the implication was that the ancients couldn't distinguish between the voices they heard in their minds and those of the external world. Hence the voices of the dead and voices of the many Gods were central in their belief system - essentially the oddities of the mind, of the subjective experience, were given supernatural explanations.
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Susannah gentThis blog is a repository for thoughts and miscellaneous material whilst undertaking a Phd on the subject of the uncanny Archives
December 2017
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