The Two Mind Hypothesis
Simplifies an understanding of bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, language, religion, self-awareness, free will, and the experience of being human for the last three million years.
Simplifies an understanding of bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, language, religion, self-awareness, free will, and the experience of being human for the last three million years.
Leavened by fresh ideas, vivid clinical vignettes, and narratives of the emotional life of our ancient human ancestors
Third in series: click for first or second (two more coming) I entered the field of psychiatry forty-seven years ago imbued by Jung’s theory of a collective unconscious. Jung felt that Freud’s concept of his superego was an attempt to make the collective unconscious personal instead of “universal and deeply historical.” As I began to think …
I have chronicled how in my study of clinical depression I gradually came to the conclusion that the basic mechanism of all major mental illnesses is similar to cancer in that it represents the escape from regulation into unrestrained pathological hyperactivity. In cancer, the hyperactivity is the growth of cancer cells; in mental illness, it …
I recently got a note from someone about Old Mind, New Mind who has suffered from mental illness. As soon as he found out that the book was about the relationship between mental illness and human evolution, he assumed that I thought that mental illnesses are adaptive in some way and expressed his reservations about …
major mental illnesses are an epiphenomenon—or “side effect”—of the major adaptation that bestowed upon us the miraculous capacities of reflective self-consciousness and the deep complexity of syntactical language that has enabled our rich symbolic culture. Therefore we should look at the mentally ill as paying the price for our extraordinary capacities.
How the mentally ill tell us who we are
While on vacation, I am reposting my most popular posts like this one on the evolutionary roots of schizophrenia.
Outline of thinking that led to hypothesis that schizophrenia is an emotional fossil for the communication system of our ancestral hominin species.
The study of schizophrenic symptoms led to solving the mystery of why early hominids evolved upright posture.
In the course of my wife’s rising career in the administration of a university, I was placed in the position of being the chatty spouse of an increasingly important player in the state politics that is part of a large public university. One of the main venues was the president’s box at football games, to …
Religion is present in two of the illnesses I treated and studied. I am fairly certain that, in both of these mental conditions, it had to do with the patients’ belief system prior to the illness—with whether the individual was primarily motivated by money and status or by religion and morality. In a small number …
While I am on vacation, I am reposting some of my more popular past posts, such as this one on the roots of schizophrenia.
Schizophrenia is the most mysterious major illness in all of medicine, made all the more fascinating to me because my own family’s secret was an afflicted aunt who had been banished to a sanatorium for her entire life. In a small room in the mortuary, I spend a half hour with her corpse meditating upon …
Religion presented itself primarily in two of the illnesses I treated and studied. I am pretty sure that in both cases it had to do with the patient’s belief system prior to the illness—whether the individual was primarily motivated by money and status or by religion and morality. In a minority of cases, melancholia would …
First and foremost, as stated above, the diagnosis of Schizophrenia is made when the patient reports that their thoughts are perceived as deriving from an external source. As well as the emotional turmoil created by this strangest of experiences, I came to the conclusion that the other dramatic symptom associated with Schizophrenia, hearing voices, was …
In Hippocrates’ time, epilepsy was known as the sacred disease, because it was if the gods had seized the patient’s body. Schizophrenia could have also been called a sacred disease, because it is as if the gods have seized the patient’s mind. The most central symptom in Schizophrenia is the unshakable belief that an external …
