64. Losing a spouse, of course, is one of the most stressful of life events, but bereavement may happen in many other situations, from the loss of a job to the loss of a beloved pet. A friend of mine was very upset when her twenty-year-old cat died, and for months she “saw” the cat and its characteristic movements in the folds of the curtains.
Another friend, Malonnie K., described a different sort of cat hallucination, after her beloved seventeen-year-old pet died:
Much to my surprise, the next day I was getting ready for work and she appeared at the bathroom door, smiled and meowed her usual “good morning.” I was flabbergasted. I went to tell my husband and when I returned, of course, she was no longer there. This was upsetting to me because I have no history of hallucinations and thought I was “above” such things. However, I have accepted that this experience was, perhaps, a result of the phenomenally close bond that we had developed and sustained over nearly two decades. I must say, I am so grateful that she stopped by one last time.
65. Loss, longing, and nostalgia for lost worlds are also potent inducers of hallucinations. Franco Magnani, “the memory artist” I
described in
66. Though “flashback” is a visual, cinematic term, auditory hallucinations can be very striking, too. Veterans with PTSD may hallucinate the voices of dying comrades, enemy soldiers, or civilians. Holmes and Tinnin, in one study, found that the hearing of intrusive voices, explicitly or implicitly accusing, affected more than 65 percent of veterans with combat PTSD.
67. Sometimes this effect can be heightened by medications. In 1970, I had one patient with postencephalitic parkinsonism who was a concentration camp survivor. For her, treatment with L-dopa caused an intolerable exacerbation of her traumatic nightmares and flashbacks, and we had to discontinue the drug.
68. In the “normal” neuroses commonly brought to psychotherapists, the buried, pathogenic material typically comes from much earlier
in life. Such patients are also haunted, but as in the title of Leonard Shengold’s book, they are
69. Freud was deeply puzzled and troubled by the pertinacity of such post-traumatic syndromes after World War I. Indeed, they forced him to question his theory of the pleasure principle and, at least in this case, to see instead a much grimmer principle at work, that of repetition-compulsion, even though this seemed maladaptive, the very antithesis of a healing process.
70. Many of the testimonies and accusations in the Salem witch trials described assaults by hags, demons, witches, or cats (which were seen as witches’ familiars). The cats would sit astride sleepers, pressing on their chests, suffocating them, while the sleepers had no power to move or resist. These are experiences we would now interpret in terms of sleep paralysis and night-mare, but which were given a supernatural narrative. The whole subject is explored by Owen Davies in his 2003 article “The Nightmare Experience, Sleep Paralysis, and Witchcraft Accusations.”
Other conditions have also been suggested as contributing to the hallucinations and hysteria of seventeenth-century New England. One hypothesis, which Laurie Winn Carlson
proposes in her book
Others have proposed that ergot poisoning played a part. Ergot, a fungus containing toxic alkaloid compounds similar to LSD, can infest rye and other grains, and if contaminated bread or flour is eaten, ergotism may result. This happened frequently in the Middle Ages, and it could cause agonizing gangrene (which led to one of its popular names, St. Anthony’s fire). Ergotism could also cause convulsions and hallucinations very similar to those of LSD.
In 1951, an entire French village succumbed to ergot poisoning, as John Grant Fuller described in his book
