Stefano Naim & Massimiliano Aragona

 

This study addresses the question of hallucinations in schizophrenic patients, with the aim of exploring their qualitative specificities at the phenomenal level of the first-person experience of perceiving.

Three levels of description were explored: the formal features, the content, and the perspective-taking. The formal features addressed were the sense of corporality of the hallucinated “object”, the level of sensorial involvement, the perceptual vividness, the perceptual constancy, the spatial localization, and the personification.

From our analysis emerged a very high variability of schizophrenic hallucinations, regarding their form as well as their content. The only formal feature that remains present in all forms of schizophrenic hallucinations is their corporality, which can be reduced but is never absent. For the rest, it is typical but not strictly necessary that they are vague, allusive phenomena. Of the content, more than the themes (persecutory, genealogical, etc.) it was typical the incongruence and the existential aura. Finally, both the implicit and explicit position-taking are severely affected in schizophrenics,

with impaired “judgment of reality” and lack of the “awareness of illness”. The role of a reduced margin of action in manipulating the experience (including the typical schizophrenic passivity and the experience of givenness), and the global transformation of reality is discussed.

In conclusion, it is remarked that hallucinations can be isolated for practical reasons of study but they are phenomenal emergencies from a complex texture represented by a global transformation of the person’s basic structures of experience.

 

Auditory Verbal Hallucinations (AVHs), Hallucinations, Schizophrenia, Pseudohallucinations, Hallucinoses, Phenomenology, Psychosis, Psychopathology

 

 

Received on June 20, 2021

Accepted on June 25, 2021

Firstly published online on June 30, 2021