Abstract
Put together during the early nineteenth century, the “received view” conceives of hallucinations as tokenized expressions of a “unitary” disorder, regardless of sense modality or etiology. This view has proven to be surprisingly infertile in regard to the understanding and management of hallucinatory experiences. In order to develop viable alternatives, it is of the essence to understand how and why the received view was constructed and unpack the antinomies that explain its epistemological incoherence. Primary and secondary antinomies are identified and some explored. It is proposed that hallucinations are heterogeneous phenomena and that those relevant to psychiatric disorder may not be in fact related to perception at all. A model of hybrid object is described according to which hallucinations are constructed out of the cultural and semantic configuration of neurobiological signals, many of which are not related to brain sites involved in perceptual functions.
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Notes
- 1.
The literature on hallucinations in the main European vernaculars is absolutely enormous, and it would be unnecessary and inimical to list only some of them. Suffice it to say that the best-quality historical and conceptual work is still to be found in French (e.g., Quercy 1930; Paulus 1941; Ey 1973; Lanteri Laura 1991).
- 2.
- 3.
- 4.
This antinomy concerns the issue of whether hallucinations result from changes in the brain or from psychogenic mechanisms. Traditionally it has been traced back to the contrast that was established between the hallucinations affecting the German patient Nicolai and the French patient Berbiguier (for references and details, see Berrios 1990).
- 5.
For a full history of this concept, see Berrios and Dening (1996).
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- 7.
Maury (1865) remains the best classical source on this issue.
- 8.
On each of these concepts, the reader will find a raft of references. Ey (1973) remains an important source in this regard.
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- 10.
Reports of “hallucinatory experiences” can be frequently found in eighteenth-century nosologies sometimes as “hallucination” and sometimes under a different name (e.g., Boissier de Sauvages 1772). In all cases, each is considered as a separate disease and certainly not as “symptoms” considered as part of a “disease.” This is because the concept of mental symptoms was only constructed during the nineteenth century (Berrios and Markova 2006; Markova and Berrios 2009)
- 11.
For an analysis of the relationship between associationism and psychiatry, and full references, see Berrios (1988).
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Berrios, G.E., Marková, I.S. (2012). The Construction of Hallucination: History and Epistemology. In: Blom, J., Sommer, I. (eds) Hallucinations. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-0959-5_5
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