Hallucinations полностью

The idea that different sorts of memory are involved gets strong support from the survivors of traumatic situations who do not get PTSD and are able to live full, unhaunted lives. One such person is my friend Ben Helfgott, who was incarcerated in a concentration camp between the ages of twelve and sixteen. Helfgott has always been able to talk fully and freely about his experiences during these years, about the killing of his parents and family and the many horrors of the camps. He can recall it all in conscious, autobiographic memory; it is an accepted, integrated part of his life. His experiences were not locked away as traumatic memories, but he knows the other side well—he has seen it in hundreds of others: “The ones who ‘forget,’ ” he says, “they suffer later.” Helfgott is one of the contributors to The Boys, a remarkable book by Martin Gilbert that relates the stories of hundreds of boys and girls who, like Helfgott, survived years in concentration camps but somehow emerged relatively undamaged and have never been subject to PTSD or hallucinations.

A deeply superstitious and delusional atmosphere can also foster hallucinations arising from extreme emotional states, and these can affect entire communities. In his 1896 Lowell Lectures (collected as William James on Exceptional Mental States) James included lectures on “demoniacal possession” and witchcraft. We have very detailed descriptions of the hallucinations characteristic of both states—hallucinations which rose, at times, to epidemic proportions and were ascribed to the workings of the devil or his minions, but which we can now interpret as the effects of suggestion and even torture in societies where religion had taken on a fanatical character. In his book The Devils of Loudun, Aldous Huxley described the delusions of demonic possession that swept over the French village of Loudun in 1634, starting with a mother superior and all the nuns in an Ursuline convent. What began as Sister Jeanne’s religious obsessions were magnified to a state of hallucination and hysteria, in part by the exorcists themselves, who, in effect, confirmed the entire community’s fear of demons. Some of the exorcists were affected as well. Father Surin, who had been closeted for hundreds of hours with Sister Jeanne, was himself to be haunted by religious hallucinations of a terrifying nature. The madness consumed the entire village, just as it would later do in the infamous Salem witch trials.⁷⁰

The conditions and pressures in Loudun or Salem may have been extraordinary, though witch-hunting and forced confession have hardly vanished from the world; they have simply taken other forms.

Severe stress accompanied by inner conflicts can readily induce in some people a splitting of consciousness, with varied sensory and motor symptoms, including hallucinations. (The old name for this condition was hysteria; it is now called conversion disorder.) This seemed to be the case with Anna O., the remarkable patient described by Freud and Breuer in their Studies on Hysteria. Anna had little outlet for her intellectual or sexual energies and was strongly prone to daydreaming—she called it her “private theater”—even before her father’s final illness and death pushed her into a splitting or dissociation of personality, an alternation between two states of consciousness. It was in her “trance” state (which Breuer and Freud called an “auto-hypnotic” state) that she had vivid and almost always frightening hallucinations. Most commonly she would see snakes, her own hair as snakes, or her father’s face transformed into a death’s-head. She retained no memory or consciousness of these hallucinations until she was again in a hypnotic trance, but this time induced by Breuer:

She used to hallucinate in the middle of a conversation, run off, start climbing up a tree, etc. If one caught hold of her, she would very quickly take up her interrupted sentence without knowing anything about what had happened in the interval. All these hallucinations, however, came up and were reported on in her hypnosis.

Anna’s “trance” personality became more and more dominant as her illness progressed, and for long periods she would be oblivious or blind to the here and now, hallucinating herself as she was in the past. She was, at this point, living largely in a hallucinatory, almost delusional world, like the nuns of Loudun or the “witches” of Salem.

But unlike the witches, the nuns, or the tormented survivors of concentration camps and battles, Anna O. enjoyed an almost complete recovery from her symptoms, and went on to lead a full and productive life.

That Anna, who was unable to remember her hallucinations when “normal,” could remember all of them when she was hypnotized, shows the similarity of her hypnotized state to her spontaneous trances.