Dialogues in Philosophy
Mental and Neuro Sciences

Dialogues in Philosophy, Mental and Neuro Sciences

The official journal of Crossing Dialogues
Volume 17, Issue 1 (June 2024)

HISTORY OF MENTAL CONCEPTS
 

Excerpt from a memoir entitled: hallucinations, the causes that produce them, and the illnesses they characterize.
Part II b: on psychic hallucinations

Jules Gabriel François Baillarger

Translated from: Baillarger JGF (1846) Extrait d’un mémoire intitulé: des hallucinations, des causes qui les produisent, et des maladies qu’elles caractérisent. Baillière, Paris (pp.383-400)

In this third and last part, Baillarger presents other examples of psychic hallucinations. He describes patients whose voices “speak in idea”, are “inner voices”, come from the epigastrium, are “thoughts at a distance”, etc. In all these cases, Baillarger remarks that they are not really voices, i.e. they are reported as voices often “for lack of another expression that better conveys what they are experiencing”. Sometimes the patients have to postulate a special faculty for hearing them, or a sixth sense, or admit the existence of conversations “soul to soul”, by magnetism, etc. All these instances lack the sensorial quality that is typical of psycho-sensory hallucinations, and are more akin to thoughts than to perceptions.

Baillarger concludes that his claim that these hallucinations are purely psychic is based:
1. On the way they are experienced: patients hear thoughts, converse from soul to soul by inspiration, hear voices that make no noise, etc.
2. On the observations made by mystical authors, who distinguished intellectual and bodily hallucinations.
3. On the existence of two kinds of hearing hallucinations in dreams.
4. On the distinction made by some patients who have experienced successively or simultaneously two distinct kinds of false perceptions of hearing.
5 On the observation by some patients that the voices they are experiences are soundless, and that admit that the word voice is not appropriate for what they are experiencing.

 
Keywords:

Auditory Verbal Hallucinations (AVHs), History of Psychiatry, History of Psychology, Psychopathology, Phenomenology, Psychotic experiences

 
Dial Phil Ment Neuro Sci 2024; 17(1): 36-47