Iain McGilchrist: Interview

Iain McGilchrist explores the key themes of his book ‘The Master and His Emissary’

The Master and his Emissary is perhaps the most influential and significant work to have appeared in the field of neuroscience and psychotherapy in the last fifty years. In this remarkable interview the author explains how the ‘divided brain’ has profoundly altered human behaviour, culture and society, and explores what the implications of this are for mental health and contemporary therapy.

Some responses to The Master and his Emissary

Sponsored

‘Really superb! The best book on laterality I have ever read, with profound implications for the nature of consciousness … … a true masterpiece.’— Professor Jaak Panksepp

‘A marvellous and highly original synthesis of ideas on how the division of labour between the two brain hemispheres can provide key insights into human nature – it’s odd that such an important subject has been neglected.’— Professor VS Ramachandran

‘A magnificent piece of scholarship.’— Professor Allan Schore

‘A landmark new book … it tells a story you need to hear, of where we live now.’— Bryan Appleyard

Who Iain McGilchrist Is

Iain McGilchrist is a psychiatrist with an unusual double career: before medicine he taught English literature as a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, and he later worked as a consultant psychiatrist at the Bethlem Royal and Maudsley Hospital in London. The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (Yale University Press, 2009) took him some twenty years to research and write, and it is that rare thing — a work of hemisphere science taken seriously by neuroscientists (Panksepp and Ramachandran above are two of the field’s major figures) that is also a full-scale interpretation of Western cultural history.

What the Argument Actually Says

The book is frequently mistaken for the pop-psychology myth it explicitly demolishes — the “logical left brain, creative right brain” cliché. McGilchrist’s claim is subtler: both hemispheres are involved in everything, but they attend differently. The right hemisphere presents the world as living, embodied, and in context; the left re-presents it — as a map, a schema, a thing to be used. His title’s warning is that the “emissary” (the left hemisphere’s useful, narrow, manipulative attention) has, in modern Western culture, usurped the “Master” it was meant to serve.

Sponsored

Why It Matters for Therapy

For clinicians, the interview’s most consequential thread is what this account implies about mental distress: states like depersonalization and some presentations of schizophrenia look, on McGilchrist’s reading, like worlds constructed almost entirely by left-hemisphere attention — abstract, devitalized, cut off from body and context. Therapy, on this view, is not information transfer but a re-training of attention within a live relationship. It is a claim that sits interestingly alongside the psychoanalytic material elsewhere in this archive — see Rod Tweedy’s essay on McGilchrist, Ang Lee and the revolution of perception for a companion piece. McGilchrist has since extended the argument in The Matter with Things (2021).