Immanuel Velikovksy's book Mankind in Amnesia (NY: Doubleday, 1982) was posthumously published a few years after he died (in 1979, aged 84).
The main theme is that humanity has a racial memory of past cataclysms. This memory is repressed, which is why there is a resistance to accepting cataclysmic theories, so for example historical writings about cataclysms are dismissed as mere "myths". Velikovsky's first books on cataclysms were focused on past cataclysms, but in this book he thinks it is important to focus on the likelihood of such a catalysm happening again, perhaps in the near future.
This "racial memory" is something beyond the memories of the isolated individual consciousness, so it is similar to Jung's archetypes or to some later ideas of Freud. Velikovsky suggests that individuality of consciousness may be a later development by humans, while animals may have one group mind.
One subsidiary idea is that along with unpleasant memories being repressed, there may also be a compulsion to re-enact the circumstances. So even if there isn't a cataclysm originating from the outer cosmos, humanity may recreate a similar cataclysm through its own agency (e.g. nuclear war). Both sources of a cataclysm seem likely, and perhaps imminent, to Velikovsky.
Fears of thunderstorms, earthquakes, tidal waves may originate from the racial memory of cataclysms, along with some compositions in literature about catastrophes. Velikovsky quotes from some of these literary materials - Byron's poem "Darkness", Edgar Allan Poe, Shakespeare.
There are also some interesting thoughts on Darwin and Darwinism. Humanity's idea of itself as the pinnacle of creation was challenged when the Earth was realized to no longer be at the centre of the universe. But Darwinism and uniformitarianism allowed it to reclaim some sense of self-importance, as the pinnacle of an evolutionary process.
There are a couple of interesting quotes from Darwin about his observations in South America. Darwin was a good observer, and saws signs of catastrophism in South America, which he was unable to explain:
"The mind at first is irresistibly hurried into the belief of some great catastrophe; but thus to destroy animals, both large and small, in Southern Patagonia, in Brazil, on the Cordillera of Peru, in North America up to Behring's Straits, we must shake the entire framework of the globe [. . .] Certainly, no fact in the long history of the world is so startling as the wide and repeated exterminations of its inhabitants." - Darwin, "Journal of Researches", quoted in Velikovsky, "Mankind in Amnesia", page 72.
The main theme is that humanity has a racial memory of past cataclysms. This memory is repressed, which is why there is a resistance to accepting cataclysmic theories, so for example historical writings about cataclysms are dismissed as mere "myths". Velikovsky's first books on cataclysms were focused on past cataclysms, but in this book he thinks it is important to focus on the likelihood of such a catalysm happening again, perhaps in the near future.
This "racial memory" is something beyond the memories of the isolated individual consciousness, so it is similar to Jung's archetypes or to some later ideas of Freud. Velikovsky suggests that individuality of consciousness may be a later development by humans, while animals may have one group mind.
One subsidiary idea is that along with unpleasant memories being repressed, there may also be a compulsion to re-enact the circumstances. So even if there isn't a cataclysm originating from the outer cosmos, humanity may recreate a similar cataclysm through its own agency (e.g. nuclear war). Both sources of a cataclysm seem likely, and perhaps imminent, to Velikovsky.
Fears of thunderstorms, earthquakes, tidal waves may originate from the racial memory of cataclysms, along with some compositions in literature about catastrophes. Velikovsky quotes from some of these literary materials - Byron's poem "Darkness", Edgar Allan Poe, Shakespeare.
There are also some interesting thoughts on Darwin and Darwinism. Humanity's idea of itself as the pinnacle of creation was challenged when the Earth was realized to no longer be at the centre of the universe. But Darwinism and uniformitarianism allowed it to reclaim some sense of self-importance, as the pinnacle of an evolutionary process.
There are a couple of interesting quotes from Darwin about his observations in South America. Darwin was a good observer, and saws signs of catastrophism in South America, which he was unable to explain:
"The mind at first is irresistibly hurried into the belief of some great catastrophe; but thus to destroy animals, both large and small, in Southern Patagonia, in Brazil, on the Cordillera of Peru, in North America up to Behring's Straits, we must shake the entire framework of the globe [. . .] Certainly, no fact in the long history of the world is so startling as the wide and repeated exterminations of its inhabitants." - Darwin, "Journal of Researches", quoted in Velikovsky, "Mankind in Amnesia", page 72.
