The American journalist Daniel Bergner published a somewhat lengthy eye-opening article in the New York Times titled "Doctors Gave Her Antipsychotics. She Decided to Live With Her Voices" (dated May 17, 2022). It is based on his new 2022 book The Mind and the Moon: My Brother's Story, the Science of Our Brains, and the Search for Our Psyches (Ecco).

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Duluth, Minnesota (OpEdNews) May 19, 2022: My favorite scholar is the American Jesuit cultural historian and media ecology theorist Walter J. Ong (1912-2003; Ph.D. in English, Harvard University, 1955) in English at Saint Louis University, the Jesuit university in St. Louis, Missouri. In 1970, Ong received a secondary appointment as the William E. Haren Professor of Humanities in Psychiatry in the School of Medicine at Saint Louis University.

I have discussed Ong's work on Western cultural history and media ecology in my lengthy OEN article "Walter J. Ong's Philosophical Thought" (dated September 20, 2020):

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Ong characterized his pioneering mature thought from the early 1950s onward as phenomenological and personalist in cast. In my opinion, his pioneering thought about our Western cultural history deserves to be more widely known. His most widely translated and most widely read book is his most accessible book Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (Methuen, 1982).

I draw on it and certain other works by Ong in my 2012 article "Walter Ong and Harold Bloom Can Help Us Understand the Hebrew Bible" in the journal Explorations in Media Ecology, volume 11, numbers 3&4, pp. 255-272.

Over the years of my teaching at the University of Minnesota Duluth (1987-2009), I taught an introductory-level survey course on the Bible about twenty times.

Because of my interest in Ong's pioneering phenomenological and personalist account of our Western cultural history, I was interested in the Jewish biblical scholar James L. Kugel's 2017 landmark book The Great Shift: Encountering God in Biblical Times (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt).

No, in Kugel's his descriptive account of the great shift in biblical times, as he styles it, he does not happen to advert explicitly to Ong's phenomenological and personalist account of our Western cultural history that I discuss in my 2012 article "Walter Ong and Harold Bloom Can Help Us Understand the Hebrew Bible." Nevertheless, Kugel's descriptive account of the great shift in biblical times can be interpreted as the historical shift from what Ong refers to as primary oral thought and expression transcribed visually in writing to the subsequent cultural influence of the visualist phonetic alphabetic literacy.

For a succinct discussion of primary oral thought and expression, see Ong's 1982 book Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (esp. pp. 36-77), mentioned above. But also see Ong's 1967 book The Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena for Cultural and Religious History (Yale University Press), the expanded version of his 1964 Terry Lectures at Yale University.

Because the ancient Jewish homeland was on an important trade route, it was conquered at different times over the centuries by different ancient empires. For example, it was conquered by Alexander the Great, whose conquest brought with it the ancient Greek language and culture. The ancient Hebrew scriptures were translated into ancient Greek.

Subsequently, the ancient Jewish homeland was conquered by the Roman Empire. But the ancient Greek language and culture persisted. The historical Jesus was crucified at the time of the ancient Jewish Passover festival in Jerusalem under the authority of the Roman Empire. Subsequently, all of the texts gathered together in the canonical New Testament were written in the ancient Greek language.

For a relevant discussion of ancient Greek culture, see the classicist Eric A. Havelock's 1963 landmark book Preface to Plato (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press). Ong's review of Havelock's book is reprinted in An Ong Reader: Challenges for Further Inquiry, edited by Thomas J. Farrell and Paul A. Soukup (Hampton Press, 2002, pp. 309-312).

Now that you know the background of my interest in Ong's pioneering mature work from the early 1950s onward, perhaps you will be able to understand why I was deeply moved when I read the American journalist Daniel Bergner's somewhat lengthy article in the New York Times titled "Doctors Gave Her Antipsychotics. She Decided to Live with Her Voices" (dated May 17, 2022):

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Briefly, Bergner's somewhat lengthy article is a profile of a woman named "Carol Mazel-Carlton who began hearing voices when she was in day care."

Now, I have never tried to count up all the ancient Hebrew prophets who had what today's psychiatrists would refer to as auditory and visual hallucinations. Fortunately, the Jewish biblical scholar James Kugel does not refer to auditory and visual hallucinations in his 2017 book The Great Shift: encountering God in Biblical Times. But I have already suggested above that we can understand Kugel's landmark book as being about what Ong (1982; 1967) refers to as primary oral thought and expression.

Consequently, it now strikes me that what today's psychiatrists refer to as auditory and visual hallucinations can also be understood descriptively as manifestations of primary oral culture in the human psyche today.

I dare say that native English speakers will understand what I mean by the human psyche. However, at the risk of seeming pedantic, let me say here that the word psyche is a transliteration of the ancient Greek word that can also be transliterated as psuche. The transliterated word psyche is also one of the ancient Greek words that form our common English word psychology - the other being transliterated as logos.

Now, Bergner aptly refers to the psyche - and the mind. He introduces us to the Hearing Voices Network support groups "for people with auditory and visual hallucinations." "What psychiatry terms psychosis, the Hearing Voices Movement refers to as non-consensus realities, and a bedrock faith of the movement is that filling a room with talk of phantasms will not infuse them with more vivid life or grant them more unshakable power."

Bergner also informs us that today's psychiatrists refer to "denial of one's diagnosis [is] termed anosognosia [and it] is seen as a glaring symptom of psychotic disorder." Oh my.

Bergner's somewhat lengthy article is based on his new 2022 book The Mind and the Moon: My Brother's Story, the Science of Our Brains, and the Search for our Psyches (Ecco).

For a related accessible book, see Daniel B. Smith's Muses, Madmen, and Prophets: Rethinking the History, Science and Meaning of Auditory Hallucination (Penguin Press, 2007; reissued in paperback edition in 2008 with a different subtitle).

For another related but more difficult book, see Julian Jaynes' The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (Houghton Mifflin, 1977). But also see Ong's discussion of Jaynes' book in his 1982 book Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (pp. 29-30), mentioned above.

The Swiss psychiatrist and psychological theorist C. G. Jung (1875-1961) conducted dangerous self-experiments in which he used the technique that he came to refer to as active imagination - a technique through which he experienced auditory and visual hallucinations, which he then subsequently elaborately processed through works of art he created. See Jung's The Read Book: Liber Novus, translated by Mark, Kyburz, John Peck, and Sonu Shamdasani; with a contextual essay and notes by Sonu Shamdasani (W. W. Norton, 2009).

Authors Website: http://www.d.umn.edu/~tfarrell

Authors Bio:

Thomas James Farrell is professor emeritus of writing studies at the University of Minnesota Duluth (UMD). He started teaching at UMD in Fall 1987, and he retired from UMD at the end of May 2009. He was born in 1944. He holds three degrees from Saint Louis University (SLU): B.A. in English, 1966; M.A.(T) in English 1968; Ph.D.in higher education, 1974. On May 16, 1969, the editors of the SLU student newspaper named him Man of the Year, an honor customarily conferred on an administrator or a faculty member, not on a graduate student -- nor on a woman up to that time. He is the proud author of the book WALTER ONG'S CONTRIBUTIONS TO CULTURAL STUDIES: THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF THE WORD AND I-THOU COMMUNICATION (Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2000; 2nd ed. 2009, forthcoming). The first edition won the 2001 Marshall McLuhan Award for Outstanding Book in the Field of Media Ecology conferred by the Media Ecology Association. For further information about his education and his publications, see his UMD homepage: Click here to visit Dr. Farrell's homepage.

On September 10 and 22, 2009, he discussed Walter Ong's work on the blog radio talk show "Ethics Talk" that is hosted by Hope May in philosophy at Central Michigan University. Each hour-long show has been archived and is available for people who missed the live broadcast to listen to. Here are the website addresses for the two archived shows:

Click here to listen the Technologizing of the Word Interview

Click here to listen the Ramus, Method & The Decay of Dialogue Interview