Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Epigraph
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Overture: Reflections of a Metaphysical Flâneur
- PART 1 BRAINS, PERSONS AND BEASTS
- PART II PHILOSOPHY AND PHYSICS
- PART III PHILOSOPHY AND PHYSIC
- 12 Medical Ethics in the Real Mess of the Real World
- 13 On Caring and Not Caring
- 14 Coinages of the Mind: Hallucinations
- 15 Becoming the Prisoners of Our Free Choices
- 16 The Right to an Assisted Death
- Epilogue: And So to Bed: Notes towards a Philosophy of Sleep from A to Zzzzzzz
- Bibliography
- Index
14 - Coinages of the Mind: Hallucinations
from PART III - PHILOSOPHY AND PHYSIC
- Frontmatter
- Epigraph
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Overture: Reflections of a Metaphysical Flâneur
- PART 1 BRAINS, PERSONS AND BEASTS
- PART II PHILOSOPHY AND PHYSICS
- PART III PHILOSOPHY AND PHYSIC
- 12 Medical Ethics in the Real Mess of the Real World
- 13 On Caring and Not Caring
- 14 Coinages of the Mind: Hallucinations
- 15 Becoming the Prisoners of Our Free Choices
- 16 The Right to an Assisted Death
- Epilogue: And So to Bed: Notes towards a Philosophy of Sleep from A to Zzzzzzz
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Until the French psychiatrist Jean-Étienne Dominique Esquirol gave them their current name, hallucinations – seeing or hearing things that are not there – were called “apparitions”. This captures their profoundly disturbing nature, an eeriness that is not fully reflected in the definition Oliver Sacks quotes from William James's classic The Principles of Psychology (1890): “An hallucination is a strictly sensational form of consciousness, as good and true a sensation as if there were a real object there. The object happens to be not there, that is all” (2012: X). Unlike mental images, hallucinations do not remain obediently inside your head – they are projected into the world that surrounds you – and they can surprise. Having a life of their own, which reinforces their compelling reality, they are intimate invasions that break into your chosen biography rather than belonging to it.
Their power to terrify may be, in part, due to their content: a giant spider irradiating venom meant just for you or something like W. H. Auden's “lean horror flapping and hopping” closing in on you “with inhuman swiftness” (The Sea and the Mirror). But even the most benign hallucination is deeply unsettling precisely because, as Sacks says, there is no “consensual validation”. Nobody else can see, hear, feel, smell or taste what you are experiencing. To be in the grip of such incorrigibly private experiences is to be sequestrated in the most profound solitude.
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- Reflections of a Metaphysical FlâneurAnd Other Essays, pp. 229 - 237Publisher: Acumen PublishingPrint publication year: 2013