Real Hallucinations is a philosophical study of the structure of human experience, its vulnerability to disruption, and how its integrity depends on interpersonal relations. It focuses on the beguilingly simple question of how we manage to routinely distinguish between our experiences of perceiving, remembering, imagining, and thinking. This question is addressed via a detailed philosophical study of auditory verbal hallucinations (usually defined as hearing a voice in the absence of a speaker) and thought insertion (somehow experiencing one’s own thoughts as someone else’s). The book shows how thought insertion, and also a substantial proportion of auditory verbal hallucinations, consist of disturbances in the structure of experience and –more specifically - in our sense of the various types of intentional state, such as believing, perceiving, remembering, and imagining, as distinct from one another. It is further argued that episodic and seemingly localized experiential disturbances such as these usually occur against a backdrop of less pronounced but much wider-ranging alterations in the structure of intentionality. To do so, the book addresses types of experience associated with trauma, schizophrenia, and profound grief. The outcome of this is a more generally applicable account of how the integrity of human experience, including the most basic sense of self, is inseparable from how we relate to other people and to the social world as a whole.
Too much or too little? Disorders of agency on a spectrum
