by Colin Wilson
I found one case particularly fascinating and intriguing; it concerned a university professor called Art, whose first marriage had been unsuccessful, and who was about to embark on a second. He was beginning to experience a deep reluctance to go through with the marriage, and he associated this with ‘inner storms’ in which a censorious voice criticised him and various people he knew. He was vaguely aware that the voice sounded like his mother — who was living in Detroit — and he had arrived at the commonsense explanation that the voice was some negative aspect of himself, and that he had somehow incorporated elements of his mother, who had always been intensely possessive towards him.
Crabtree followed his usual procedure, placing Art in a state of deep relaxation, and then opening a dialogue with the mother, who was called Veronica. Veronica was perfectly willing to talk at length about her relation to her son, and about why she disapproved of so many of his friends. ‘Veronica came across as blatantly, almost naively, self-centred …’ She explained that she simply wanted to make her son recognise that many people he trusted — including his future wife — were stupid and scheming and not worthy of his respect.
Crabtree asked her if she thought all this interference could be good for her son, or even good for herself, and she finally admitted that the answer was probably no. In Detroit she was living a drab and boring life, and Crabtree pointed out that if she paid more attention to her own affairs and less to her son’s, things might improve.
During the therapy, Art’s mother discovered that she had a cancerous growth, and had to have an operation. The ‘Veronica’ who spoke through Art’s mouth agreed that this might be because she was robbing herself of vitality by ‘possessing’ her son. And at this point, Art’s ‘inner voice’ began to fade, until he finally ceased to hear it. But there was a remarkable change in his mother in Detroit. She had been experiencing a slow deterioration, and emotional withdrawal from life. Now, suddenly, her vitality began to return; she started going out and making new friends. ‘She seemed to have gained the proverbial “new lease” on life.’
Crabtree insists that his own attitude towards such cases is not that of a believer in the paranormal; he claims to be merely an observer, a phenomenologist, who simply treats each case ‘as if it were possession. And clearly, there is nothing contradictory in such an attitude; Susan and Sarah and Art could have been manufacturing the voices themselves; the unconscious mind is capable of far more remarkable feats. Still, the fact remains that most readers will feel that, taken all together, these cases make an overwhelming impression of being something more than unconscious self-deception.
I turned back to Julian Jaynes to see what he had to say about ‘disembodied voices’. He outlines his theory in a remarkable work called The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, published in 1976 (‘bicameral’ means simply having two compartments). Jaynes advances the extraordinary theory that our remote ancestors heard ‘voices’ all the time, the reason being that — according to Jaynes — early man lacked all self-awareness in our modern sense of the word. Jaynes believes that our cave-man ancestors could not look inside themselves and say: ‘Now let me think …’, because they had no ‘inner me’. Their eyes were like a car’s headlamps, directed permanently towards the outside world. So if one of these men was ordered to go and build a dam down the river, he would find it extremely difficult to remember why he was ambling along the river bank. But his sense of purpose would be refreshed by a voice — the voice of his chief — which seemed to come from the air above his head, and which would repeat his instructions.
And where would that voice come from? According to Jaynes, from the right-hand side of the brain. For Jaynes’s theory depends heavily on the science of ‘split-brain’ research, which has made such remarkable advances since the mid-1950s.
For some reason no one yet understands, the brain consists of two identical halves, as if a mirror had been placed down the middle. (It has even been suggested that one of them is intended as a ‘spare’ in case the other half gets damaged). The top part of the brain, the part immediately below the skull, is the specifically human part; it is called the cerebrum, or cerebral hemispheres, and it has developed at a phenomenal speed over the past half million years (which, in evolutionary terms, is the mere bat of an eyelid). If you could remove the top of the skull, the two halves of the brain would look rather like a walnut. The bridge that joins them together is a bunch of nerves called the corpus callosum.
For more than a century it has been known that the left hemisphere deals with language and logical thinking, while the right seems to deal with patterns and intuitions. The left enables us to add up a column of figures, the right to recognise somebody’s face. You could say that the left is a scientist and the right is an artist. A man with left-brain damage will probably develop a speech impediment, but he could still draw a picture or hum a tune. A man with right-brain damage will sound perfectly logical and coherent, but he will probably not even be able to draw a matchstick man.
The strangest thing is that if the bridge joining the two halves, the corpus callosum, is severed (as it sometimes is, to prevent epilepsy), the patient literally becomes two people. One ‘split-brain’ patient tried to unzip his flies with one hand while the other tried to do them up; another tried to hit his wife with one hand, while the other held it back. Another tried to do a jigsaw puzzle with his right hand, and his left hand kept trying to interfere, so that he had to sit on it. (It should be added that the right brain controls the left side of the body, and vice versa — once again the reason is a mystery.)
But the most significant discovery is that the person you call ‘you’ lives in the left brain; the person who lives in the right seems to be a stranger. One split-brain patient whose right brain was shown a dirty picture (i.e. with her left eye) blushed; when asked why she was blushing, she replied: ‘I don’t know.’
Jaynes believes that ‘disembodied voices’ come from this ‘other person’ in the right side, and that they sound in the left brain — the ‘you’ — as if through a loudspeaker.
There is one obvious objection to this theory. Jaynes is not a split-brain patient, yet he had an auditory hallucination. The same applies to Adam Crabtree’s patients. The curious answer is that, to some extent, we are all split-brain patients. Every one of us is more or less out of touch with that deeper intuitive self. Mozart once remarked that tunes were always walking into his head fully fledged. What he meant, obviously, was that tunes came into his left brain — the ‘I’ — from the other half, the half that creates tunes and pictures. And if even Mozart is, in some sense, a split-brain patient, then the rest of us most certainly are.
According to Jaynes, it was voices that walked, fully fledged, into the left brain of our remote ancestors. They assumed — understandably — that these were the voices of the gods — or of God — and this is why people in the Old Testament or the Iliad are always being told what to do by divine voices …
This particular aspect of Jaynes’s theory is irrelevant to our present discussion; all that concerns us here is his belief that ‘voices’ originate in the right brain, and that men have been hearing them since the beginning of human history. If that is correct, it certainly offers a plausible explanation for the voice of Sarah’s grandmother and Susan’s father and Art’s mother — in fact, in the latter case, it sounds far more convincing than the notion that a living woman in Detroit could somehow ‘get inside’ her son’s head in distant Toronto.
It is when Jaynes goes on to discuss the voices heard by mental patients that certain doubts begin to arise. He points out that most of the cases that have been studied involve schizophrenics, and says: ‘They converse, threaten, curse, criticise, consult, often in short sentences. They admonish, console, mock, command, or sometimes simply announce everything that’s happening. They yell, whine, sneer, and vary from the slightest whisper to a thunderous shout. Often the voices take on some special peculiarity, such as speaking ver
y slowly, scanning, rhyming, or in rhythms, or even foreign languages. There may be one particular voice, more often a few voices, and occasionally many …’
The voices described by Crabtree do not sound in the least like this bewildering babble; they apparently conversed like any normal person. And the same applies to the housewife who held long conversations with her grandmother as she was making the beds. There is no reason, of course, why ‘phantom voices’ should not sound like those of a normal person; but it seems to be a fact that most of them don’t.
This is confirmed by a study made by another clinical psychologist, Dr Wilson Van Dusen, formerly of the Mendocino State Hospital in California. Van Dusen spent sixteen years observing the effect of hallucinations, and he describes his findings in a chapter called ‘The Presence of Spirits in Madness’ in his book The Presence of Other Worlds. His conclusions are, perhaps, even more startling than those of Julian Jaynes.
Van Dusen explains that most patients who are hallucinating prefer to keep their experiences to themselves, since they know it will be taken as a proof that they are mad. However, one unusually cooperative patient asked him if he would mind talking directly with her hallucinations, and he did. Naturally, the hallucination could not answer Van Dusen direct; he had to ask the patient to give an account of what he could hear and see. But there was nothing to stop Van Dusen addressing the hallucination directly. ‘In this way I could hold long dialogues with a patient’s hallucinations and record both my questions and their answers.’ And, like Adam Crabtree, he insists: ‘My method was that of phenomenology. My only purpose was to describe the patient’s experiences as accurately as possible. The reader may notice that I treat the hallucinations as realities — that is what they are to the patient.’
One consistent finding, says Van Dusen, was that the patients felt as if they had contact with another world or order of beings. ‘Most thought these other persons were living. All objected to the term “hallucination”.’
For most individuals the hallucinations came on quite suddenly. One woman was working in the garden when an unseen man addressed her. Another man described sudden loud noises and voices he heard when riding in a bus. Most were frightened, and adjusted with difficulty to this new experience. All the patients described voices as having the quality of a real voice, sometimes louder, sometimes softer, than normal voices. The experience they described was quite unlike thoughts or fantasies; when things are seen they appear fully real. For instance, a patient described being awakened one night by air force officers calling him to the service of his country. He got up and was dressing when he noticed their insignia wasn’t quite right, then their faces altered. With this he knew they were of the Other Order and struck one hard in the face. He hit the wall and injured his hand. He could not distinguish them from reality until he noticed the insignia …
Most patients soon realise that they are having experiences that others do not share, and for this reason learn to keep quiet about them. Many suffer insults, threats and attacks for years from voices with no one around them aware of it.
Perhaps Van Dusen’s most significant finding is that he learned that his patients seemed to experience two distinct kinds of ‘voices’; he speaks of these as the ‘higher order’ and the ‘lower order’:
Lower order voices are similar to drunken bums at a bar who like to tease and torment just for the fun of it. They suggest lewd acts and then scold the patient for considering them. They find a weak point of conscience, and work on it interminably. For instance, one man heard voices teasing him for three years over a ten cent debt he had already paid. They call the patient every conceivable name, suggest every lewd act, steal memories or ideas right out of consciousness, threaten death, and work on the patient’s credibility in every way. For instance, they brag that they will produce some disaster on the morrow and then claim credit for one in the daily paper. They suggest foolish acts, such as raise your right hand in the air and stay that way, and tease if he does it and threaten him if he doesn’t.
In fact, it seems clear that these ‘lower order’ hallucinations behave exactly like bored children with nothing better to do.
The vocabulary and range of ideas of the lower order is limited, but they have a persistent will to destroy. They invade every nook and cranny of privacy, work on every weakness and belief, claim awesome powers, make promises, and then undermine the patient’s will …
A few ideas can be repeated endlessly. One voice just said ‘hey’ for months while the patient tried to figure out whether ‘hey’ or ‘hay’ was meant. Even when I was supposedly speaking to an engineer … the engineer was unable to do any more arithmetic than simple sums … The lower order voices seem incapable of sequential reasoning. Though they often claim to be in some distant city, they cannot report more than the patient hears, sees or remembers. They seem imprisoned in the lowest level of the patient’s mind …
The ‘lower order’, then, are basically tormenters. But about one fifth of the hallucinations seem to be of a higher order, and they, on the other hand, seem concerned with helping the patient. The ‘higher order’ is much more likely to be symbolic, religious, supportive, genuinely instructive; it can communicate directly with the inner feelings of the patient. It is similar to Jung’s archetypes, whereas the ‘lower order’ is like Freud’s id. Van Dusen mentions a case of a gaspipe fitter who experienced a ‘higher-order’ hallucination of a lovely woman who entertained him while showing him thousands of symbols. ‘… his female vision showed a knowledge of religion and myth far beyond the patient’s comprehension’. After Van Dusen had been holding a dialogue with this ‘higher-order’ hallucination, the gaspipe fitter asked for just one clue to what they had been talking about.
Van Dusen reports that he has been told by these ‘higher-order’ beings ‘that the purpose of the lower order is to illuminate all of the person’s weaknesses’. And the purpose — or one of the purposes — of the ‘higher order’ seems to be to protect people against the ‘lower order’:
This contrast may be illustrated by the experiences of one man. He had heard the lower order arguing for a long while about how they would murder him. He also had a light come to him at night, like the sun. He knew it was a different order because the light respected his freedom and would withdraw if it frightened him. In contrast, the lower order worked against his will, and would attack if it could sense fear in him. This rarer higher order seldom speaks, whereas the lower order can talk endlessly.
While the ‘lower order’ ‘is consistently nonreligious and anti-religious’, jeering angrily at the least mention of religion, the ‘higher order’ ‘appeared strangely gifted, sensitive, wise and religious’.
Van Dusen made one extremely striking observation about the hallucinations. Although he was able to observe a very large number of them over the years, he soon realised that ‘after twenty patients, there wasn’t much to be learned’ because the hallucinations were all so similar. This in itself seems baffling. After all, one would expect to find as many different types of hallucination as there are people. For example, one might expect vets to have hallucinations that claim to be talking animals, engineers to be tormented by talking machines, gardeners to be haunted by talking plants or trees, librarians by talking books, dentists by talking sets of false teeth. Nothing of the sort. The ‘lower-order’ hallucinations were all strikingly similar; so were those of the ‘higher order’. This either implies some basic similarity in the part of our minds that create hallucinations, or something far stranger …
Van Dusen is inclined to believe in something far stranger. Through his interest in ‘hypnogogic phenomena’ — the odd dreams and visions we sometimes experience on the edge of sleep — Van Dusen seems to have turned to the writings of the Swedish religious mystic Emanuel Swedenborg, whose Journal of Dreams is full of fascinating raw material for the psychiatrist. After a career as a highly successful engineer and geologist, Swedenborg went through a mental crisis at the age of fifty-six �
�� in 1744 — during which he experienced horrifying nightmares: being caught in the wheel of a huge machine, feeling between a woman’s thighs to find that her vagina was full of teeth … Finally, he dreamed he was holding a conversation with Jesus. He abandoned science and became an obsessive student of the scriptures. The result was a series of remarkable works containing his own theology. He became one of the most powerful influences on the religious thought of his time.