Week of October 23, 1978.

He looked like a Shakespearean actor down on his luck.

—E.L. Doctorow, Ragtime.

At age twenty-four I found myself in psychotherapy with an

osteopathic psychiatrist named I.J. Oberman. Dr. Oberman had
trained with the eminent psychoanalyst Theodor Reik, who, in
turn, trained as one of Freud’s first students in Vienna. Reik
contributed to Freud’s intriguing paper, The Uncanny, which
describes, for example, the experience of meeting someone for the
first time and having the unreal sense that one has encountered
the individual before. Freud speculates that in such a situation
“the subject identifies himself with someone else, so that he is in
doubt as to which his self is, or substitutes the extraneous self for
his own.” Freud wrote that an uncanny feeling is produced
“when the distinction between imagination and reality is effaced,
as when something that we have hitherto regarded as imaginary
appears before us in reality.” The nature of the uncanny is
entirely subjective, based upon our own experiences but haunts
each of us to varying degrees.

At my therapy session, Dr. Oberman told me he would be

canceling the next week’s appointment. He planned to fly to
Honolulu to attend the Annual Meeting of the American College
of Neuropsychiatrists, where he would present a paper on the
mind-body connection and the problem of consciousness. A
quirky psychiatrist, Dr. Oberman happened to have a copy of the
paper in his office and proceeded to read aloud several
paragraphs that featured a lengthy quotation from the
grandiloquently lyrical opening of Julian Jaynes’ recently-
published and critically-acclaimed book, The Origin of
Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.

Like a Shakespearean performer breaking into a puffed-up parody

of a theatrical soliloquy, Dr. Oberman declaimed:

O, what a world of unseen visions and heard silences, this

insubstantial country of the mind! What ineffable essences, these
touchless rememberings and unshowable reveries! And the privacy of
it all! A secret theater of speechless monologue and prevenient
counsel, an invisible mansion of all moods, musings, and mysteries,
an infinite resort of disappointments and discoveries. A whole
kingdom where each of us reigns reclusively alone, questioning what
we will, commanding what we can. A hidden hermitage where we
may study out the troubled book of what we have done and yet may
do. An introcosm that is more myself than anything I can find in a
mirror. This consciousness that is myself of selves, that is everything,
and yet is nothing at all – what is it? And where did it come from?
And why?

Had it not been for the fact that the subject matter of Dr.
Oberman’s paper interested me, I might have been appalled by
my doctor’s self-aggrandizing display of expropriated verbal
dexterity and play-actor’s melodrama.

Jaynes controversially claims that human consciousness did not

begin far back in animal evolution—a view inherited from
Darwin’s theory—but instead is a learned process that came
about only three thousand years ago and is still developing.
Jaynes’ thesis, based on his reading of Homer’s epic tales, The
Iliad and The Odyssey, which were written around the eighth or
seventh century BCE, is that early antiquity had not yet
developed the modern sense of consciousness. Jaynes points out
that, indeed, Homer’s writings contain no word for mind at all.
Abandoning the assumption that consciousness, or the ability to
introspect, is innate, Jaynes explains that it instead “arises . . .
from language, and specifically from metaphor.”