Hallucinations полностью

Stories of such hauntings and hallucinations have a substantial place in the myths and literature of every culture. Thus Hamlet’s murdered father appears to him (“In my mind’s eye, Horatio”) to tell him how he was murdered and must be avenged. And when Macbeth is plotting the murder of King Duncan, he sees a dagger in midair, a symbol of his intention and an incitement to action. Later, after he has had Banquo killed for threatening to expose him, he has hallucinations of Banquo’s ghost; while Lady Macbeth, who has smeared Duncan’s blood over his slain grooms, “sees” the king’s blood and smells it, ineradicable, on her hands.⁶³

Any consuming passion or threat may lead to hallucinations in which an idea and an intense emotion are embedded. Especially common are hallucinations engendered by loss and grief—particularly following the death of a spouse after decades of togetherness and marriage. Losing a parent, a spouse, or a child is losing a part of oneself; and bereavement causes a sudden hole in one’s life, a hole which—somehow—must be filled. This presents a cognitive problem and a perceptual one as well as an emotional one, and a painful longing for reality to be otherwise.

I never experienced hallucinations after the deaths of my parents or my three brothers, though I often dreamt of them. But the first and most painful of these losses was the sudden death of my mother in 1972, and this led to persistent illusions over a period of months, when I would mistake other people in the street for her. There was always, I think, some similarity of appearance and carriage behind these illusions, and part of me, I suspect, was hyper-alert, unconsciously searching for my lost parent.

Sometimes bereavement hallucinations take the form of a voice. Marion C., a psychoanalyst, wrote to me about “hearing” the voice (and, on a subsequent occasion, the laugh) of her dead husband:

One evening I came home from work as always to our big empty house. Usually at that hour Paul would have been at his electronic chessboard playing over the game in the New York Times. His table was out of sight of the foyer, but he greeted me in his familiar way: “Hello! You’re back! Hi!” . . . His voice was clear and strong and true; just the way it was when he was well. I “heard” it. It was as if he were actually at his chess table and actually greeting me once more. The other part was that, as I said, I couldn’t see him from the foyer, yet I did. I “saw” him, I “saw” the expression on his face, I “saw” how he moved the pieces, I “saw” him greet me. That part was like one sees in a dream: as if I were seeing a picture or a movie of an event. But the speech was live and real.

Silas Weir Mitchell, working with soldiers who had lost limbs in the Civil War, was the first to understand the neurological nature of phantom limbs—they had previously been regarded, if at all, as a sort of bereavement hallucination. By a curious irony, Mitchell himself suffered a bereavement hallucination following the sudden death of a very close friend, as Jerome Schneck described in a 1989 article:

A reporter brought the unexpected news one morning and Mitchell, greatly shaken, went up to tell his wife. On the way back downstairs he had an odd experience: he could see the face of Brooks, larger than life, smiling, and very distinct, yet looking as if it were made of dewy gossamer. When he looked down, the vision disappeared, but for ten days he could see it a little above his head to the left.

Bereavement hallucinations, deeply tied to emotional needs and feelings, tend to be unforgettable, as Elinor S., a sculptor and printmaker, wrote to me:

When I was fourteen years old, my parents, brother and I were spending the summer at my grandparents’ house as we had done for many previous years. My grandfather had died the winter before.

We were in the kitchen, my grandmother was at the sink, my mother was helping and I was still finishing dinner at the kitchen table, facing the back porch door. My grandfather walked in and I was so happy to see him that I got up to meet him. I said, “Grampa,” and as I moved towards him, he suddenly wasn’t there. My grandmother was visibly upset, and I thought she might have been angry with me because of her expression. I said to my mother that I had really seen him clearly, and she said that I had seen him because I wanted to. I hadn’t been consciously thinking of him and still do not understand how I could have seen him so clearly.

I am now seventy-six years of age and still remember the incident and have never experienced anything similar.

Elizabeth J. wrote to me about a grief hallucination experienced by her young son: