The Myth of Irrationality: The Science of the Mind from Plato to Star Trek

Clears up misconceptions about irrationalism and looks at madness, dreams, laughter, genius, imagination, altered states, and emotions

McCrone ( The Ape That Spoke ) redraws the map of psychology in this iconoclastic, often provocative work. He labels as harmful fallacy the persistent belief, from Plato to Freud, that humans have an irrational, emotional core. Instead of Freud's model dividing the mind into ego, id and superego, McCrone advances a bifold model differentiating the mind's animal roots from its cultural components--self-awareness, language, thought, refined feeling, memory. Central to his theory is the "inner voice" with which we speak silently in our heads and which, McCrone argues, is instrumental to thought. Blaming the "myth of irrationality" for today's rampant individualism and cult of self-assertion, he advocates a self-aware, "post-romantic" approach to experiencing emotion. So-called feral children, the mental processes of the deaf and the neglected research of Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky, who investigated the "inner voice" in the 1930s, provide grist for McCrone's thesis.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

A sometimes intriguing, if uninspired, examination of the history of psychology and the workings of the human mind. McCrone, a science and technology writer based in England, returns to the turf of his previous book, The Ape that Spoke (1991), to examine the mind and the importance of language in shaping our ability to think. He argues that all of our higher faculties are language-driven abilities that we learn as children. McCrone claims that this is distinct from the theory promulgated throughout history about human capacity for creativity and inspiration. He blames Plato for creating the tripartite fiction that the mind is divided into base appetites (the animal in us), rationality, and higher abilities that are the divine spark in us. The myth, perpetuated by Romantics like Rousseau and codified by Freud in his theories of the unconscious, is that some mysterious ability to be irrational allows humans to transcend themselves. In reality, says McCrone, the mind is only a twofold mechanism with its animal, instinctual ``hardware'' and its socially conditioned ``software'' driven by our ability to use language to order the stream of consciousness. Beyond the basics, everything is driven by culture. Language ability must be learned when one is a small child or it can never be fully acquired. As evidence, the author delves into the reported cases of feral children, who have grown up in the wild deprived of human contact. He also examines seemingly ``mysterious'' examples of supposed irrationality, such as dreams, insanity, emotions, and ``peak'' experiences (in which reality is heightened) to demonstrate how they can be explained by his scheme. McCrone claims the stakes are high and that a new view of the mind is sorely needed. Caricaturing his opponents, he does little but rehash the Enlightenment view of the self without bringing much new to the table. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

The belief that human creativity and emotion spring from deep wells of irrationality pervades Western culture. McCrone challenges this belief, boldly defying even the testimony of Plato, Aquinas, Wordsworth, and Freud. The problem, in McCrone's view, lies in the persistence of an inadequate model of the mind. Enlightenment thinkers such as Hobbes and Leibniz had begun to dispel the mysteries surrounding psychological processes when disciples of Rousseau and Freud arose to ridicule their faith in rational reasoning and to affirm the unfathomable strength--demonic or divine--of the untutored subconscious. McCrone aims to get the Enlightenment project back on track by advancing a "bifold" model of the mind in which culturally determined patterns of thought and feeling give a recognizably human stamp to the merely animal impulses derived through evolution. Such a model makes it unnecessary to invoke innate human irrationality when explaining artistic inspiration, impulsive humor, mysterious dreams, or even schizophrenia. Perhaps more important, when irrationality goes out the window, so, too, does the modern cult of rebellious individualism. Many defenders of poetry, religion, and psychoanalysis will find McCrone's reasoning too reductive. But he effectively forces us to look at an old debate from a new angle.