Dissident Consciousness

The deep weirdness of the 1970s: Julian Jaynes & Deleuze/Guattari and the Anti-Psychiatry & Pro-Psychedelic Movements

Today’s post is about intellectual history, with a personal angle. The personal angle is that a lot of my interest in history has always been focused on the deep weirdness of the world I was born into in the 1970s, the sense of dislocatedness that defined so much of that era, and the transcendental homelessness it induced in me.

As soon as I started to become historically conscious, the very first thought I had was: how the heck did the world around me get to be so damned weird? For me, this awakening consciousness of the historical context of the world around me was at first a bit of like Jason Bourne coming to and not knowing who he is, or Leonard Shelby in Christopher Nolan’s “Memento” trying to figure out who Sammy Jenkins is. Those scenes convey well the feelings I had as I started to develop a consciousness of history in media res. And because of when I happened to be born, this experience happened to take place for me in the the 1970s which, by odd coincidence (or maybe not?!), happened also to be a moment of highly peculiar philosophical ideas about this very question.

Indeed, it’s fair to say that the 1970s were a moment of radical reconsideration of human consciousness, sanity, and the foundations of Western thought — a post-metaphysical analog to the dislocations of political economy that also defined that era. In particular, two influential albeit disparate philosophical works appeared in this mid-1970s that, when viewed through a particular lens, had some surprising convergences: Princeton philosopher Julian Jaynes’s The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1976) and badboy French philosophes Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1972, English translation 1977). Though I don’t know whether Jaynes and D&G had any contact with one another, both texts sought to re-frame schizophrenia not merely as a mental disorder but as a potentially dissident, pre-modern or post-modern form of consciousness. Both these books also partook in a broader cultural-intellectual moment that included the so-called “anti-psychiatry movement,” championed by figures like R.D. Laing, Michel Foucault, and Thomas Szasz, as well as the pro-psychedelic counter-culture. All of these together challenged established medical and societal norms concerning mental health.

Julian Jaynes’s book starts with perhaps the most bravado opening to a work of philosophy I’ve ever read: “When asked the question, what is consciousness? we become conscious of consciousness. And most of us take this consciousness of consciousness to be what consciousness is. This is not true.” What Jaynes proposes instead is that human consciousness as we understand it today — characterized by introspection, subjective experience, and a unified self — is not some timeless psychological fact about human nature, but rather is a relatively recent cultural invention that emerged only around the second millennium BCE. Prior to this, Jaynes asserts, the human mind existed in a “bicameral” state, where individuals experienced auditory hallucinations, e.g. “voices in their heads,” which they perceived as divine commands or pronouncements from gods, ancestors, or rulers. These voices, originating from the right hemisphere of the brain, provided guidance and direction, effectively acting as the executive function for individuals whose left hemispheres had not yet developed the capacity for introspective thought. Jaynes argues that the breakdown of this bicameral mind, triggered by societal pressures, natural disasters, and the rise of complex social structures, led to a crisis that necessitated the invention of consciousness as a new mode of cognitive control.

Jaynes viewed what psychiatrists in the 1970s called schizophrenia as in essence a form of reversion to this earlier bicameral state. For Jaynes, the contemporary schizophrenic’s experience of hearing voices was not a pathological aberration but a recrudescence of an ancient, once-normal cognitive structure. He suggested that the “breakdown” that takes places in the schizophrenic is precisely a breakdown of the conscious ego that allows the older, bicameral mechanisms to resurface. This perspective re-conceptualized schizophrenia, shifting it from a purely medical dysfunction to a vestige of a prior, albeit now maladaptive, form of human cogitation. This suggested that the schizophrenic mind, far from being simply “broken,” as mainstream psychiatrists of the time insisted, instead offered a glimpse into a different, historically preceding way of experiencing the world — a kind of pre-conscious or non-conscious existence where agency was externalized and perceived as divine command.

At almost the same moment, though from a radically different philosophical and psychoanalytic tradition, Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus launched a blistering critique of Freudian psychoanalysis and its perceived role in reinforcing capitalist structures. D&G introduced the concept of “desiring-machines,” arguing that the unconscious is not a theater of repressed desires as Freud had claimed but rather a factory of productive flows and connections. For D&G, the Oedipus complex served to enclose (“territorialize”) and thus normalize desire, channeling it into familial and societal structures that ultimately served the interests of capitalism by turning us into obedient employees and consumers.

D&G’s re-framing of schizophrenia is central to what they call their “schizoanalysis.” Unlike the Freudian psychoanalytic view that treated schizophrenia as a retreat from reality into a chaotic interiority, D&G celebrated the schizophrenic as a figure who resists the Oedipalizing forces of society. The schizophrenic, in their view, did not suffer from a lack of connection to reality, but rather was too connected to the raw, untamed flows of desire and the universal processes of production. They were the ultimate “desiring-machines,” constantly making connections, “deterritorializing” established meanings, and escaping the rigid codifications imposed by social systems. Schizophrenia, for D&G, was thus not a sad personal pathology but rather a potential escape from the suffocating confines of the individuated, Oedipalized subject, offering a glimpse of a “body without organs” — a liberated, fluid, and non-hierarchical mode of being. As such the schizoid also held political significance as a potentially revolutionary force, a radical break from the normative, a commitment to “process” and a rejection of (the) “state.”

Despite their vastly different methodologies — Jaynes’s historical-psychological hypothesis versus D&G’s philosophical-psychoanalytic critique — the overlap between Jaynes and D&G lay in their shared impulse to de-pathologize schizophrenia and elevate it to a status beyond mere illness. Both saw the schizophrenic not as experiencing a failure or lack but rather as pursuing an alternative. For Jaynes, it was an echo of a lost functional past; for D&G, it was a vanguard of a unregulated revolutionary future. Both challenged the singular, normative definition of “consciousness” or “sanity” imposed by modern Western thought and institutions. Jaynes suggested that our current consciousness was an acquired state, not an inherent one, claiming that other states (like the bicameral) were equally “natural” in their own historical context. D&G pushed further, arguing that if the sane (that is, the “normal”) conscious subject was a product of oppressive social coding, then the schizophrenic was one who had escaped from this coding.

These sorts of philosophical ideas achieved a certain popularity (or perhaps notoriety) in the 1970s in part because of how they drew on and resonated with an important social movement, the so-called “anti-psychiatry” movement of the 1960s and 70s. Figures like the Scottish psychiatrist R.D. Laing, particularly in works like The Divided Self (1960), had argued that what contemporary medicine diagnosed as mental illness, and in particular schizophrenia, was often a desperate attempt to preserve an authentic self in the face of overwhelming social pressures. As such, what mainstream psychiatry depicted as insanity was in fact a sane interior response to an insane exterior world. Laing viewed the “breakdown” as a potential “breakthrough,” a journey into the depths of the self that could lead to profound personal transformation. For Laing and his fellow travelers, like the Hungarian-American psychiatrist Thomas Szasz, the primary villains were the “institutions” of psychiatric control, a villainy memorably symbolized in the character of Nurse Ratched in Ken Kesey’s “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” (1962).

From this countercultural perspective, psychiatric wards were represented not as curative sites for the mentally unhealthy but as prisons that normies used to suppress what today would be called the “neuro-divergent” and social dissidence more generally. As a recent Los Angeles Times piece put it, “In their heyday, the hospitals were seen as models of progressive care. But some of the treatments considered cutting edge at the time, including forced sterilizations and lobotomies, came to be viewed as profoundly inhumane.” At the end of October 1963, in the last piece of legislation President Kennedy would sign, the federal government passed the Community Mental Health Act, which helped lead to significant deinstitutionalization nationally. (This would be followed in California in 1967 by the Lanterman-Petris-Short Act, signed by newly-installed governor Ronald Reagan, which decreed, among other things, that authorities could take people into custody only for 72-hour psychiatric holds.)

This anti-institutional, anti-psychiatric perspective also dovetailed with the coeval pro-psychedelic movement — in which Ken Kesey, by no coincidence, was also a major player — which believed that hallucinogenic substances were not “drugs of abuse” but rather should be seen as tools for exploring altered states of consciousness, dissolving ego boundaries, and accessing different modes of perception and reality. For proponents of psychedelic use, the fact that the experience of “tripping” mirrored aspects of what was traditionally labeled “psychosis” or “schizophrenia” suggested that these states were not inherently pathological but perhaps pathways to “alternative” understandings of the world. The connections of psychedelic tripping and schizophrenia had indeed already been proposed by mainstream medical psychedelic researchers in the 1950s, who claimed that the effect of LSD was to induce a “temporary schizophrenia.” Some of this material is in retrospect unintentionally hilarious:

By the 1970s, the counter-cultural skirmishes of the 1960s — often caricatured as a clash between “hippies and squares” — had ripened into a fundamental questioning of the very nature of reality, sanity, and the self. Thinkers like Julian Jaynes and D&G, on the one hand, and the anti-psychiatry and pro-psychedelic social movements, on the other, coalesced to forge a powerful counter-narrative that challenged the bedrock definitions of “mental health” and “normalcy.” They suggested that what mainstream society labeled as illness might, in fact, be a different, perhaps more authentic or insightful, way of experiencing the world, pushing the culture wars into the very architecture of human consciousness.

Growing up in the wake of these movements in the 1980s was for me a rather odd experience. I didn’t learn any of this history until much later, but I saw all around me the results of the uneasy truce that had been reached in these earlier intellectual and political battles. On the one hand, the anti-psychedelic propagandists had won the day as part of the wider anti-drug crusades of the period. LSD was represented as being every bit as dangerous, and maybe even worse, than the drug that was actually destroying vast swathes of the country at the time, namely crack cocaine. That anti-psychedelic perspective has indeed only just begun to recede in the last decade or so.

On the other hand, by the 1980s, the anti-psychiatry movement had also largely won, as many kinds of behavioral and mental traits that had been pathologized during the much more socially conformist early postwar years were increasingly being reframed as “alternative” ways of being. The primary example here, of course, was the American Psychiatric Association’s decision in the mid-1970s to declassify homosexuality as a “mental disorder.” While homosexuals in the 1980s were certainly still subject to violence and discrimination, the intellectual road to social normalcy had already been paved. Less happily, the success of the anti-psychiatry movement’s “deinstitutionalization” campaign (done in partnership with Ronald Reagan who, in a classic “politics makes strange bedfellows” moment, was as always happy to cut government funding of a social service) led to the shuttering of most of the country’s psych wards. This loss of institutional support for mental health in no small measure explains the epidemic of homelessness among the mentally ill in the United States today.

In sum, these radical intellectual and social movements from the 1970s ended up having real world material consequences for my own lived experience as a teen coming of age in Ronald Reagan’s America. And this is exactly what spurred my interest in becoming an intellectual historian of the era.