[Whit Blauvelt]

Gary,

A quick, thorough answer. Thanks! Yes to all that, in terms of Jung — and even Freud, who in The Ego and the Id is explicit about identifying ego with what can be brought into linguistic representation. So it could be that to be Jungian (and, as he did, skip the term “ego”) about McGilchrist we can have the RH be the “self” and the LH be, perhaps, the “persona” (although complicated by the whole “shadow” discussion). But this opens to further questions.

Where Freud had a view that consciousness just is controlled by what can cross the threshold from the unconscious into linguistic representation, Jung certainly did not. There’s a lot of current research showing that most people — especially those outside of academic professions — typically and frequently experience awareness and ideas which, while very much conscious, are not in words.

This does not mean such folks are especially saner than those of us who are quite constantly verbal among our thoughts, but it also means Freud was, in the larger picture, wrong. So what I mean here is the feeling of having a center, a self, consciously aware, planning, acting. The Sperry examples show we can have two, after surgery. But that by no means shows we have two, when the brain is whole. So it’s in this context that I pose my questions above.

Best,

Whit