We are now getting somewhere, and it is a frightening where. Because we have entered the landscape depicted by Richard Condon in his terrific novel The Manchurian Candidate: Not only can delusions and hallucinations be induced in virtually any person, but the added horror of “posthypnotic suggestion” gets thrown in for good measure. . . and, by the Pavlov Institute, all this for clearly worked-out political purposes. I don’t think I’m wandering into fantasy here, because recall: Freud originally became involved in a form of psychotherapy that utilized hypnosis as its cardinal tool. In other words, all modern depth psychology — that which postulates some region of the mind unavailable to the person’s conscious self, and which, on many an occasion, can preempt the self — grows from the observation of individuals acting out of complete convictions and perceptions and motivations implanted by “suggestion” during the hypnotic state. Suggestion? How weak a word; how little it conveys, compared to the experience itself. (I’ve undergone it and it is, beyond doubt, the most extraordinary thing that ever happened to me.) What the body of “suggestions” add up to for the hypnotized subject is nothing less than a new worldview superimposed on the subject’s customary one; there is no limit to the extent of this induced new view or gestalt of data perceptions and organizing ideas within the mentational processes of the brain — no limit to its extent, its duration, or its departure not only from what we quaintly call “reality.” And — this simply can’t be, logically, but it is so — the subject can be altered physically, in terms of what he is able to do; he can lie rigid between two chairs and be stood on, so even the somatic portion of him is new. . . sometimes even to the point of contradicting what we know to be anatomically possible, as relating to the circulatory system, etc. (e.g., holding his arm extended for a considerable time); the time limit is imposed by purely physiological factors, and there simply can be no psychogenic explanation as to such a phenomenon, unless we wish to posit yoga or Psionic or — let’s face it — magical powers. But powers of this sort by whom? The patient? The hypnotist? It makes no sense either way, unless we restore the seventeenth-century notion of wizards and those who are victims of wizardly spells. . . and where does this take us? I doubt if even John W. Campbell, Jr. [influential SF editor of Astounding magazine, whose rigid approach to SF plotting was disapproved of by Dick] would want to venture along this path.
However, perhaps we can construct something comprehensible out of this by recalling that there now appears some validation of extrasensory perceptions — and abilities. There is a relationship; as far back as 1900 Freud himself noted palpable evidence, during free association by his patients, of telepathic ability. (I really hate to have learned this, having jeered at ESP for years; but Freud’s documentation alone — and he was an incredibly scrupulous observer — tends to strengthen the case for ESP.) And, recently, in absolutely reputable psychiatric journals, trained M.D. psychiatrists have given us the news that telepathic perceptions by their patients occur so frequently as to be beyond dispute. Ehrenwald, published by W. W. Norton, which is reputable, with a foreword by Gardner Murphy, goes so far as to construct an entire theory of mental illness based on firsthand observation of his severely disturbed patients that they are experiencing involuntary telepathic linkage; the paranoids, for example, receive as sense data the marginal, repressed, unspoken hostile thoughts and feelings of those around them; he declares that again and again, while passing through hospital wards, paranoid patients quoted to him word for word hostile thoughts that he was entertaining toward them — and, of course, concealing such thoughts, as we all do, in order to keep our interpersonal relationships functioning. So now, in my prolix, rambling way, I have gotten to my Big Scoop. Taking Ehrenwald’s utterances at face value (that is, accepting them as true and using them as a postulate), we are faced with the clear and evident possibility that at least in the case of paranoids — or, anyhow, some paranoids — the “delusions” are not delusions at all, but are, on the contrary, accurate perceptions of an area of reality that the rest of us cannot (thank the Lord) reach. All right; now let’s return to and reexamine the entire topic of mental illness, hallucinations both negative and positive, the hypnotic experience, pseudoschizophrenic sensory distortions brought about by chemicals such as LSD and organic toxins such as are found in some mushrooms, etc., and, to be absolutely certain that I make a fool of myself, I’ll add mysticism, the mystical event called “conversion,” such as happened to St. Paul. Ready? Okay.
Can a person be psychotic without hallucinating? Yes. The paranoids merely have “delusional ideas”; they see the same reality that we do, but interpret it differently, work it into their system.
Can a person hallucinate without being psychotic? Yes, as for example during the hypnotic state, under drugs, when ill with a high fever, poisoned — for many reasons.
What is the relationship between hallucination and worldview? The German psychological notion (more accurately Swiss) is that each individual has a structured, idiosyncratic, and in some regards unique way of picturing or experiencing — or whatever it is one does with — reality. It now is universally accepted that reality “in itself,” as Kant put it, is really unknown to any sentient organism; the categories of organization, time, and space are mechanisms by which the living percept-systems, including the portions of the brain that receive the “raw” sense data, require the imposition of a subjective framework in order to turn what would otherwise be chaotic into an environment that is relatively constant, with enough abiding aspects so that the organism can imagine, on the basis of memory (the past) and observing (the present), what the future probably will be. Continuity is essential; one must be able to recognize a good deal of the external world in order to function (this, of course, is why the name problem is real and not a figment of medieval imagination; the logos, the word, turns chaos into separate and different objects).
A good deal of this organization is done within the percept system itself; that is, by less-than-conscious portions of the neurological apparatus, so by the time the “self” receives the sense data it has so to speak been automatically structured into the idiosyncratic worldview. The self (or ego or some damn fool thing) is therefore presented with material a good deal of which originated within its own being, at one level or another. In the light of this, the idea of hallucinating takes on a very different character; hallucinations, whether induced by psychosis, hypnosis, drugs, toxins, etc., may be merely quantitatively different from what we see, not qualitatively so. In other words, too much is emanating from the neurological apparatus of the organism, over and beyond the structural, organizing necessity. The percept system in a sense is overperceiving, is presenting the self portion of the brain too much. The cognitive processes, then, in particular the judging, reflecting frontal lobe, cannot encompass what it has been given, and for it — for the person — the world begins to become mysterious. No-name entities or aspects begin to appear, and, since the person does not know what they are — that is, what they’re called or what they mean — he cannot communicate with other persons about them. This breakdown of verbal communication is the fatal index that somewhere along the line the person is experiencing reality in a way too altered to fit into his or her own prior worldview and too radical to allow empathic linkage with other persons.
But the crucial question as to where, at what stage, these perplexing aspects, augmentations, or warpages away from the commonly shared view begin, is not answered by any of this. We are aware today that a good deal of what we call “external reality” consists of a subjective framework by the percept system itself, and that there are probably as many different worldviews as individuals. . . but how do unwanted, even frightening, and certainly not commonly shared “hallucinations” creep in? Up until the last three or four years it would have been generally agreed that these invasions of the orderly continuity of world experience beyond doubt originate in the person, at some level of the neurological structure, but now, for the first time, really, the body of evidence has begun to swing the other way. Entirely new terms such as “expanded consciousness” are heard, terms indicating that research, especially with hallucinatory drugs, points to the probability, whether we like it or not, that, as in the case of Jan Ehrenwald’s paranoids, the percept system of the organism is overperceiving, all right, and undoubtedly presenting the judging centers of the frontal lobe with data they can’t handle, and this is bad because there can be no judgment under such circumstances, and no interpersonal life, due to the breakdown of the shared language — but the overperception emanates from outside the organism; the percept system of the organism is perceiving what is actually there, and it should not be doing so, because to do so is to make the cognitive process impossible, however real the entities perceived are. The problem actually seems to be that rather than “seeing what isn’t there” the organism is seeing what is there — but no one else does, hence no semantic sign exists to depict the entity and therefore the organism cannot continue an empathic relationship with the members of his society. And this breakdown of empathy is double; they can’t empathize his “world,” and he can’t theirs.