Brian J. McVeigh
Brian J. McVeigh (born 1959) is a scholar of Asia who specializes in Japanese pop art, education, politics, and history. He is also a theorist of cultural psychology and historical changes in human mentality. He received his doctorate in 1991 from Princeton University's Department of Anthropology. While a graduate student, he studied under Julian Jaynes whose influence is apparent in his research. He taught at the University of Arizona until 2013 and is a licensed mental health counselor. Currently he is researching how a Jaynesian psychology can be developed for therapeutic purposes, as seen in his The Self-healing Mind: Harnessing the Active Ingredients of Psychotherapy. Research McVeigh has developed Jaynes's ideas in The Psychology of Ancient Egypt: Reconstructing a Lost Mentality, The Psychology of the Bible: Explaining Divine Voices and Visions, How Religion Evolved: Explaining the Living Dead, Talking Idols, and Mesmerizing Monuments, and The Psychology of Westworld: When Machines Go Mad. In this book McVeigh analyzed how the HBO series Westworld incorporated Jaynes's ideas of bicamerality. In The "Other" Psychology of Julian Jaynes: Ancient Languages, Sacred Visions, and Forgotten Mentalities he examined what he calls the super-religiosity of Bronze Age civilizations and proposed the "bicameral civilization inventory hypothesis" and