Hallucinations often seem to have access to more memories and knowledge than the patient himself — even as did the gods of antiquity. It is not uncommon to hear patients at certain stages of their illness complain that the voices express their thoughts before they have a chance to think them themselves.
This process of having one’s thoughts anticipated and expressed 13 Gustav Storring, Mental Pathology (Berlin: Swan Sonnenschein, 1907), p. 27.
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aloud to one is called in the clinical literature Gedankenlaut-werden and is approaching closely the bicameral mind. Some say they never get a chance to think for themselves; it is always done for them and the thought is given to them. As they try to read, the voices read in advance to them. Trying to speak, they hear their thoughts spoken in advance to them. Another patient told his physician that: “Thinking hurts him, for he can not think for himself. Whenever he begins to think, all his thoughts are dictated to him. He is at pains to change the train of thought, but again his thinking is done for him . . . In church he not infrequently hears a voice singing, anticipating what the choir sings
. . . If he walks down the street and sees, say, a sign, the voice reads out to him whatever is on it . . . If he sees an acquaintance in the distance, the voice calls out to him, ‘Look, there goes so and so,’ usually before he begins to think of the person. Occasionally, though he has not the least intention of noticing passersby, the voice compels him to attend to them by its remarks about them.”14
It is the very central and unique place of these auditory hallucinations in the syndrome of many schizophrenics which it is important to consider. Why are they present? And why is “hearing voices” universal throughout all cultures, unless there is some usually suppressed structure of the brain which is activated in the stress of this illness?
And why do these hallucinations of schizophrenics so often have a dramatic authority, particularly religious? I find that the only notion which provides even a working hypothesis about this matter is that of the bicameral mind, that the neurological structure responsible for these hallucinations is neurologically bound to substrates for religious feelings, and this is because the source of religion and of gods themselves is in the bicameral mind.
Religious hallucinations are particularly common in the so-14 Ibid., p. 30.
414 Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind in the Modern World called twilight states, which are a kind of waking dream in many patients, varying in time from a few minutes to a few years, six months’ duration being quite common. Invariably such states are characterized by religious visions, posturing, ceremony, and worship, a patient living with hallucinations just as in the bicameral state, except that the environment itself may be hallucinated and the hospital surroundings blotted out. The patient may be in contact with the saints in heaven. Or he may recognize doctors or nurses around him for what they are, but believe that they will prove to be gods or angels in disguise. Such patients may even cry with joy at talking directly with the inhabitants of heaven, may continually cross themselves as they converse with the divine voices or even with the stars, calling to them out of the night.
Often the paranoid, after a lengthy period of difficulties in getting on with people, may begin the schizophrenic aspect of his illness with an hallucinated religious experience in which an angel, Christ, or God speaks to the patient bicamerally, showing him some new way.15 He becomes convinced therefore of his own special relationship to the powers of the universe, and the pathological self-reference of all the occurrences around him then becomes elaborated into delusional ideas which may be pursued for years without the patient’s being able to discuss it.
Particularly illustrative of the tendency toward religious hallucinations is the famous case of Schreber, a brilliant German jurist around the close of the nineteenth century.16 His own extremely literate retrospective account of his hallucinations while ill with schizophrenia is remarkable from the point of view of their similarity to the relationships of ancient men to their gods. His disease began with a severe anxiety attack during which he hallucinated a crackling in the walls of his house. Then one night, 15 Eugen Bleuler, Dementia Praecox or The Grouf of Schizophrenias, Joseph Zinkin, trans. (New York: International Universities Press, 1950), p. 229.
16 D. P. Schreber, Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, I. MacAlpine and R. A.
Hunter, trans, and eds. (London: Dawson, 1955).
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the cracklings suddenly became voices which he immediately recognized as divine communications and “which since then have spoken to me incessantly.” The voices were continuous “for a period of seven years, except during sleep, and would persist undeterred even when I was speaking with other people.”17 He saw rays of light like “long-drawn-out filaments approaching my head from some vast distant spot on the horizon . . . Or from the sun or other distant stars that do not come towards me in a straight line, but in a kind of circle or parabola.”18 And these were the carriers of the divine voices, and could form into the physical beings of gods themselves.
As his illness progressed, it is of particular interest how the divine voices soon organized themselves into a hierarchy of upper and lower gods, as may be supposed to have occurred in bicameral times. And then, streaming down their rays from the gods, the voices seemed to be trying to “suffocate me and eventually to rob me of my reason.” They were committing “soul-murder,“ and were progressively “unmanning” him, that is, taking away his own initiative or eroding his analog Later in his illness, during more conscious periods, he narratized this into the delusion of being bodily turned into a woman. Freud, I think, overemphasized this particular narratization in his famous analysis of these memoirs, making the entire illness the result of repressed homosexuality that was erupting from the unconscious.19 But such an interpretation, while possibly related to the original etiology of the stress that began the illness, is not very powerful in explaining the case as a whole.
Now, can we have the temerity to draw a parallel with such phenomena of mental illness and the organization of gods in antiquity? That Schreber also had voice-visions of “little men” is suggestive of the figurines found in so many early civilizations.
17 Ibid., p. 225.
18 Ibid., pp. 227-228.
19 Sigmund Freud, “Psycho-analytic notes on an autobiographical account of a case of paranoia,” in Complete Psychological Works, Vol. 12, James Strachey, trans.
and ed. (London: Hogarth Press, 1958).
416 Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind in the Modern World And the fact that, as he slowly recuperated, the tempo of speech of his gods slowed down and then degenerated into an indistinct hissing20 is reminiscent of how idols sounded to the Incas after the conquest.
A further suggestive parallel is the fact that the sun as the world’s brightest light takes on a particular significance in many unmedicated patients, as it did in the theocracies of bicameral civilizations. Schreber, for example, after hearing his “upper God (Ormuzd)” for some time, finally saw him as “the sun . . . surrounded by a silver sea of rays . . .21 And a more contemporary patient wrote: