The Wayward Mind: An Intimate History of the Unconscious

by Guy Claxton

This book brilliantly charts history’s many different ways of explaining the unconscious mind, from ancient descriptions of the “underworld” to theories of contemporary neuroscience. Guy Claxton’s beautifully written book takes in intellectual and cultural history, literature, and spirituality. In The Wayward Mind, the common image of the mind is skillfully redrawn to acknowledge the constant influence of its invisible foundations on everyday human behavior.

Genres: Psychology, History, Nonfiction

416 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2005

About the author

Guy Claxton is Emeritus Professor of the Learning Sciences at the University of Winchester. His many publications include Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind: Why Intelligence Increases When You Think Less. He lives in the UK.

Reviews

[Lee Kofman · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love the sheer ambition of this book, and the author's erudition and the breadth of references. I love how freely the author kept moving between epochs and disciplines to discuss the main approaches to understanding that mind phenomenon we lump under the broad term ‘unconscious’ – the supernatural, psychological and biological. I learned a lot from the book. But what threw me a bit is that the author claimed at the start that he wasn’t an evangelist of the neuroscientific approach, and yet he ended up privileging it way above psychological explanations, plus giving this component of human mind an almost absolute credit for the decisions we make in life. To me this is almost as simplistic as attributing everything to God’s will. Still, overall this book is a gem in many ways, and I particularly enjoyed the discussion of creative processes.

[Ed · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really interesting intellectual history of the idea of the unconscious, coupled with some relevant neuroscience. In delineating the unconscious he of course has a lot of interesting things to say about the conscious mind.

I loved the way he used so much intellectual history to tell his story, while continually connecting it back to emerging neuroscience.

A very generative book that I will have to read a second time to get the most out of it. It's insights continue to reverberate and change how I think about how I think, decide and what goes on in my brain that I am not consciously aware of.

[Gordon · Rating 4 out of 5]

My impressions were up and down all through the book. Invariably clever, but not consistently insightful and certainly not quite what I was expecting. The best part (in my opinion, and not surprisingly given Claxton's training) came towards the end, on the neurological aspects of unconsciousness. All in all a convincing portrait of what's going on "in there" - one that challenges many fundamental beliefs.