Brian J. McVeigh
Brian J. McVeigh (born 1959) is a scholar of Asia who specializes in Japanese pop art, education, politics, and history. He is also a theorist of cultural psychology and historical changes in human mentality. He received his doctorate in 1991 from Princeton University's Department of Anthropology. While a graduate student, he studied under Julian Jaynes whose influence is apparent in his research. He taught at the University of Arizona until 2013 and is a licensed mental health counselor. Currently he is researching how a Jaynesian psychology can be developed for therapeutic purposes, as seen in his The Self-healing Mind: Harnessing the Active Ingredients of Psychotherapy. Research McVeigh has developed Jaynes's ideas in The Psychology of Ancient Egypt: Reconstructing a Lost Mentality, The Psychology of the Bible: Explaining Divine Voices and Visions, How Religion Evolved: Explaining the Living Dead, Talking Idols, and Mesmerizing Monuments, and The Psychology of Westworld: When Machines Go Mad. In this book McVeigh analyzed how the HBO series Westworld incorporated Jaynes's ideas of bicamerality. In The "Other" Psychology of Julian Jaynes: Ancient Languages, Sacred Visions, and Forgotten Mentalities he examined what he calls the super-religiosity of Bronze Age civilizations and proposed the "bicameral civilization inventory hypothesis" and the "embryonic psycholexicon hypothesis" of archaic societies. He called for a "stratigraphic psychology" that acknowledges radical changes in human psyche by incorporating evolutionary psychology findings while steering clear of simplistic cultural evolutionism. Jaynes's impact is also evident in McVeigh's first project which explored the role of spirit possession in a Japanese religious movement. His findings were published in Spirits, Selves, and Subjectivity in a Japanese New Religion: The Cultural Psychology of Belief in Sûkyô Mahikari (1997) and "Spirit Possession in Sûkyô Mahikari: A Variety of Sociopsychological Experience." His other relevant articles include "Mental Imagery and Hallucinations as Adaptive Behavior: Divine Voices and Visions as Neuropsychological Vestiges", "Standing Stomachs, Clamoring Chests and Cooling Livers: Metaphors in the Psychological Lexicon of Japanese" and "The Self as Interiorized Social Relations: Applying a Jaynesian Approach to Problems of Agency and Volition." In A Psychohistory of Metaphors: Envisioning Time, Space, and Self through the Centuries McVeigh applies a Jaynesian analysis to how over time increasing abstraction and analogizing have radically altered our perceptions of time, space, and psyche. In The History of Japanese Psychology: Global Perspectives, 1875-1950 McVeigh continued his interest in a Jaynesian perspective in research on the history of Japanese psychology in an effort to illustrate global shifts in nineteenth-century definitions of human nature that resonate with the emergence of the independent citizen as the building block of national state construction, the autonomous producer and consumer of economic liberalism, the "inward turn" to a privileged protagonist in art, and the individualized subject as the crucial unit of analysis in academic psychology. McVeigh edited a series of informal, wide-ranging, and unstructured discussions with Jaynes, compiled in Discussions with Julian Jaynes: The Nature of Consciousness and the Vagaries of Psychology. In this book Jaynes clarified the meaning of "consciousness" and explored the history of psychology