When the secondary sensory elements come to the foreground and
stand out clearly in consciousness, a full-fledged hallucination
arises. In the phenomena of synaesthesia we have hallucinations
in the simplest form, inasmuch as only isolated secondary
sensory elements dissociated from their active primary central
elements stand out in the foreground of consciousness. This
very simplification, however, of hallucinations reveals their
inner character. The most complex hallucinations are only
complex compounds, so to say, of secondary sensory elements.
Hallucinations are not anything mysterious, different from what
we find in the normal ordinary processes of perception; they
are of the same character and have the same elements in their
constitution as those of perception. Both hallucinations and
percepts have the same secondary as well as primary elements. The
difference between hallucinations and percepts is only one of
relationship, of rearrangement of elements, primary and secondary.
When _secondary sensory elements become under conditions of
dissociation dynamically active in the focus of consciousness we
have hallucinations_.
From this standpoint we can well understand why a hallucination,
like a percept, has all the attributes of external reality. A
hallucination is not any more mysterious and wonderful than a
percept is. We do not recognize the humdrum percept, when it
appears in the guise of a hallucination, and we regard it as some
strange visitant coming from a central, or from some supersensory
universe. Hallucinations, like percepts, are constituted of primary
and especially of secondary sensory elements, and like percepts,
hallucinations too are induced peripherally.
How is it with suggested[13] or hypnotic hallucinations? Do we
find in hypnotic or suggested hallucinations, as in the case of
hallucinations in general, the requisite primary and secondary
sensory elements directly and indirectly induced? Binet makes an
attempt to establish a peripheral stimulus in the case of hypnotic
hallucinations, claiming that there is a _point de repére_, a
kind of a peg, on which the hypnotic hallucination is hung. It
is questionable whether Binet himself continued to maintain this
position. However the case may be, this position is hardly tenable
when confronted with facts. Hypnotic hallucinations may develop
without any peg and prop.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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