“The most important conversations you’ll ever have are the ones you have with yourself.”
— Unknown
Hey, it's Chris,
We tend to think of mental health as a matter of chemistry, of trauma, of circumstances. Sometimes it is. But often, the real leverage point lies elsewhere... in how the mind itself is constructed, and how we relate to that construction.
Julian Jaynes, in his radical theory of the bicameral mind, proposed that consciousness... as we know it... is not an innate biological function. It’s a learned behavior, emerging through metaphor, language, and cultural evolution.
That structure began to break down a few thousand years ago, leading to what we now experience as introspective consciousness... an inner voice, a mental stage, a chatty narrator.
Jaynesian Therapeutics picks up from here.
The Mind Is An Invention
Unlike conventional therapy models that treat consciousness as a neutral tool, Jaynesian psychology asks us to question the very framework of that tool. It shows us that the "self" we often protect or defend is a kind of fiction... a metaphorical construct.
And in recognising this, we gain power.
Because what is constructed... can be reconstructed.
I invite you to engage consciously with the voice in our heads... not to silence it, but to see it. To track the metaphors and analogies running in the background. To understand where they came from. And most of all, to rewrite the scripts that no longer serve us.
This is not mindfulness in the modern wellness sense. Introspection isn’t about “quieting the mind” or “being present.” Those practices often take us away from language, away from narrative.
Language is the very medium of conscious healing.
“Subjective conscious mind is an analog of what is called the real world. It is built up with a vocabulary or lexical field whose terms are all metaphors or analogs of behavior in the physical world.” — Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, p. 55
Meaning: Consciousness is a metaphor-generated model of the world, and we are its authors.
A Practice of Re-Authorship
So how do we apply this?
Try this:
Instead of meditating to escape the voice, listen to it.
But do so like an archaeologist, excavating the layers beneath it.
Ask yourself:
- Whose voice is this really?
- What metaphors does it use to describe me, my life, my worth?
- What assumptions is it built on... and are they even mine?
You are not your voice.
You are the one who can edit it.
This kind of mental excavation is slow, deliberate work. But over time, it produces profound shifts in behaviour, and identity.
It's the process of restoring agency.
Jaynes didn’t offer easy answers. But he offered something better: a map of the mind’s construction. And with it, a new kind of therapeutic freedom... the ability to rebuild your internal world, using the very tools that created it.
~ Chris