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A Psychohistory of Metaphors traces how, in response to historical change, metaphors have expanded our introspective capabilities. By illuminating how new experiences borrowed from visual and spatial perceptions have transformed cognition itself, unexpected linkages among notions of time, geography, and psyche are revealed.
List of contents
Foreword
Acknowledgments and Notes to Reader
Prologue - Explaining History's "Inward Turn"
- Chapter 1 - My Search for Heaven and Hell
- Chapter 2 - Purposes and Premises: Tracing the Trajectories of Human Experience
- Chapter 3 - The Magic of Metaphors: How Our Minds Make the World
- Chapter 4 - Unpacking the "Black Box" of Conscious Interiority
Part One - Space: Hollowing Out the Person
- Chapter 5 - Envisioning the Invisible: Spatializing the Soul
- Chapter 6 - Invoking Introspectable Worlds
- Chapter 7 - The Collapse of Premodern Cosmology
Part Two - Psyche: The Origins of Scientific Psychology
- Chapter 8 - The Foundations of the Modern Study of Mind
- Chapter 9 - The Great Cosmic Split: Dualism
- Chapter 10 - Reactions to the Cartesian Split
- Chapter 11 - Early Psychology: Making Visible the Contents of the Soul
Part Three - Time: Modern Millenarianism and Politics as "Progress"
- Chapter 12 - Meta-Framing Time: The Invention of History
- Chapter 13 - Liberating the Psyche: The Emerging Faith in Progress
- Chapter 14 - The History of Humankind: Climbing the Ladder of Civilization
- Chapter 15 - Envisaging the Future as Paradise
Part Four - Self: Turning the World Inside Out
- Chapter 16 - The Changeable Self through the Centuries
- Chapter 17 - The Narratized Individual as Social Actor
- Chapter 18 - The Self as Mirror in Historical Perspective
- Chapter 19 - The Birth of Modern Psychology
Epilogue - Visualizing New Vistas of Modernity and Selfhood
- Chapter 20 - The Therapeutic Turn
- Chapter 21 - Self-Idolatry: The Dark Side of the Psychotherapeutic Society
- Chapter 22 - Modern Spatiality, the Soul, and the Psyche
Appendix A: How to Open the "Black Box": Cultural Psychology
Appendix B: What Conscious Interiority Is Not
Appendix C: Spaces: Real and Imaginary
Appendix D: The Visible, Invisible, and Introspectable
References
Index
About the Author
About the author
Brian J. McVeigh has an MA and a PhD in anthropology from Princeton University, as well as an MS in counseling. He is interested in how the human mind adapts, both through history and psychotherapeutically. Inspired by and using the theories of Julian Jaynes as a theoretical framework, he has published 16 books on the history of Japanese psychology, the origins of religions, the Bible, spirit possession, art and popular culture, linguistics, nationalism, and changing definitions of self, time, and space. He has lived and worked in Japan and China for many years, taught at the University of Arizona for ten years, and now works in private practice as a licensed mental health counselor.
Summary
A Psychohistory of Metaphors traces how, in response to historical change, metaphors have expanded our introspective capabilities. By illuminating how new experiences borrowed from visual and spatial perceptions have transformed cognition itself, unexpected linkages among notions of time, geography, and psyche are revealed.
