Verbal Hallucinations and Pre-Conscious Mentality

Abstract

There is wide agreement that verbal hallucinations are the most preeminent symptom in the psychopathology of schizophrenia, even though the phenomenon does not apparently occur in every case. Some psychiatrists, indeed, think that schizophrenic episodes always begin with such hallucinations, but this is very difficult to establish, just as it is very difficult to study hallucinations in schizophrenics at all. Very often a patient will deny hearing voices for any or several of three reasons: either at the command of his hallucination, or because he fears some treatment such as electro-shock, or because he does not want his voices probed into. In this paper, I shall first present some of the data we have found in our studies and then suggest a theoretical framework into which they can be placed.