The construction of hallucination: History and epistemology

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.