You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Iain McGilchrist has the unusual distinction of having been a Fellow of All Souls, Oxford, in English Literature, a consultant psychiatrist at the Maudesley Hospital, London and a neuroimaging researcher at Johns Hopkins University Hospital, Baltimore. He has now written this intelligent, stimulating book which presents the reader with something of a tour de force in its survey of the functioning of, and relationship between, the left and right cerebral hemispheres and the putative consequences of these matters for the worlds of human relatedness, feeling, perception, culture and so on. The ‘Master’ and ‘Emissary’ of the book's title evidently derive from a parable due originally to Nietzsche: '[..] a wise spiritual master['s ..] cleverest and most ambitious vizier [..] began to see himself as the master, and [..] became contemptuous of his master. And so it came about that the master was usurped, the people were duped, the domain became a tyranny; and eventually it collapsed in ruins' (p. 14). The parable foreshadows a thesis then developed through the book in which the ‘Master’ in the fable comes to betoken right-hemisphere modes of cerebral functioning and contingent personal experience, and the ‘Emissary’ several modes then represented as associated with the left-hemisphere. The essence of this thesis is that the Emissary is perpetrating something of a heist, a takeover. In a nutshell: ‘The Master is betrayed by his emissary’ (p. 14).
The book comprises an introduction together with two substantial parts, each of six chapters, and a conclusion. Part One focuses on the brain itself and what it can tell us. Here's McGilchrist: ‘Only the right hemisphere is in touch with primary experience, with life; and the left hemisphere can only ever be a staging post, a processing house, along the route - not the final destination. The right hemisphere certainly needs the left, but the left hemisphere depends on the right’ (p. 209). It seems that following right-hemisphere-med