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RR 2011/07 A Dictionary of Hallucinations Jan Dirk Blom Springer New York, NY 2010 xiv + 553 pp. ISBN 978 1 4419 1222 0 (print); ISBN 978 1 4419 1223 7 (e-book) £69 $99
Keywords Dictionaries, Sensory perception
Review DOI 10.1108/09504121111107007
I have to confess that when the editor first told me that there was a new reference book on hallucinations I had expected something fairly trashy. There were a lot around in the late 1960's, following up Aldous Huxley's Doors of Experience and Timothy Leary's Psychedelic Experience (supposedly based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead though I could never really see the connection). I was not wholly reassured by the front cover of this book - a reproduction of Oliva's lurid picture of The Absinthe Drinker with an elongated Alice in Wonderland and some brain scans superimposed. I was pleasantly surprised therefore to find that this is a very solid, workman-like scientific text.
Hallucinations, dreams, prophecies and visions have played a notable part in history. Some would even argue that they have played an extremely important part - Jaynes (1976) (not cited here as far as I can see) argued that auditory hallucinations formed the origin of consciousness, so that schizophrenia, for example, is merely an after-effect of what it is that actually makes us human. For most of history, the idea that visions or hallucinations were connected to illness was unthinkable. They were a matter for priests rather than physicians. It was, perhaps, unfortunate that the first large-scale scientific studies of hallucinations were undertaken by the Society for Psychical Research - not a name likely to encourage serious doctors to get involved. Freud stepped firmly into the study of dreams, and even reported on his own hallucinations - "... when I was living alone in a foreign city... I quite often heard my name suddenly called by an unexpected and beloved voice" (Zur Psychopathologie...