Hallucinatory phenomena in my opinion are the same thing you've been doing here all day. There's no formal difference between hallucinations and the processes you use if I ask you to remember anything that happened this morning, or what happened when I said "Ammonia" and all of you went "uhhhrrrhhh!" As far as I can tell, there are some subtle differences between people who are in mental hospitals and people who are not. One is that they are in a different building. The other is that many of them don't seem to have a strategy to know what constitutes shared reality and what doesn't.
Who has a pet? Can you see your pet sitting here on the chair? (Yes.) OK. Now, can you distinguish between the animal that you have here, and the chair that it is sitting on? Is there anything in your experience that allows you to distinguish between the fact that you put the visual image of the pet there, and the fact that the image of the chair was there before you deliberately put it there? Is there any difference? There may not be.
Woman: Oh, yes, there is.
OK. What is the difference? How do you know that there is a real chair and there's not a real dog?
Woman: I really can see that chair in my reality here and now. But I can only picture the dog in my head, in my mind's eye—
You don't see the dog over here sitting in the chair?
Woman: Well, only in my mind's eye.
What's the difference between the image of the chair in your mind's eye and the image of the dog in your mind's eye? Is there a difference? Woman: Well, one's here and one isn't.
Yes. How do you know that, though?
Woman: Well, I still see the chair even when I look away and look back. But if I stop thinking about the dog in the chair, the dog isn't there anymore.
OK. You can talk to yourself, right? Would you go inside and ask if there is a part of you at the unconscious level that is capable of having the dog there when you look back? Would you make those arrangements and find out if you can still tell the difference? Because my guess is there are other ways you know, too.
Woman: The image of the dog isn't as clear.
OK, so that's one way that you make a reality check. Would you go inside and ask if there is a part of you that can make it as clear?
Woman: Not while I'm awake.
I know your conscious mind can't do it. I'm not asking that question. Can you talk to yourself? Can you go "Hi, Mary, how are you?" on the inside? (Yes.) OK. Go inside and say "Is there any part of me at the unconscious level which is capable of making that image of the dog as clear as the chair?" And be sensitive to any response you get. It may be verbal, it may be a feeling, it may be something visual. While she's doing that, does anyone else know how they know the difference?
Man: Well, earlier when you hit the chair I could hear a sound. When you hit the dog, I couldn't.
So essentially your strategy consists of going to another representational system and noticing whether there is a representation that corresponds in that system to what you detected in another system.
Woman: I know I put the dog there.
How do you know that?
Woman: Because I can remember what I did.
OK, how do you remember putting the dog there? Is that a visual process? Do you talk to yourself? OK. Now I want you to do that same process for putting the chair there. I want you to put the chair here, even though it's already here. I want you to go through the same process you used to put the dog here to put the chair here and then tell me what, if any, difference there is.
Does anybody know the point of all this?
Woman: We're all schizophrenic.
Of course we're all schizophrenic. In fact, R. D. Laing is far too conservative when he talks about schizophrenia being a natural response. Evolutionarily the next step, which we're all engaged in, is multiple personality. You're all multiple personalities. There are only two differences between you and an officially diagnosed multiple personality: (1) the fact that you don't have to have amnesia for how you are behaving in one context; you can remember it in another context, (2) you can choose how to respond contextually. Whenever you don't have a choice about how you respond in context, you are a robot. So you have two choices. You can be a multiple personality or a robot. Choose well.
The point that we're trying to make that the difference between somebody who doesn't know their hallucination is a hallucination and yourselves is only that you have developed some strategy by which you know what is shared reality and what is not. And if you are going to have hallucinations, you probably have them about ideas instead of about things.
If one of you in the audience said "Well, wait a minute, there really is a dog there, anybody can see that!" then probably one of the other people in this room would take you away.
Now, when Sally used the word "pensive" earlier, she was hallucinating with exactly the same formal process that a schizophrenic does. For example, there was a mental patient who looked at us and said "Did you just see me drink a cup of blood?" He was doing exactly the same thing. He was taking input from the outside, combining it in an interesting way with a response he was making internally, and then assuming it all came from the outside.
There are only two distinctions between anybody in this room and an institutionalized schizophrenic: (1) whether you have a good reality strategy and you can make that distinction, and (2) whether the content of your hallucination is socially acceptable or not. Because you all hallucinate. You all hallucinate that somebody's in a good mood or a bad mood, for example. Sometimes it really is an accurate representation of what you are getting from the outside, but sometimes it's a response to your own internal state.
And if it's not there, sometimes you can induce it. "Is something wrong?" "What's bothering you?" "Now I don't want you to worry about anything that happened today while you were gone."
Drinking blood in this culture is not acceptable. I've lived in cultures where that's fine. The Masai, in Eastern Africa, sit around and drink cups of blood all the time. No problem. It would be weird in their culture for somebody to say "I can see that you are feeling very bad about what I just said." They would begin to wonder about you. But in this culture it's reversed.
When we trained residents in mental hospitals we used to go up early and spend time in the wards because the patients there had problems we never had the opportunity to encounter before. We would give them the task of determining for themselves which parts of their experience were validated by other people, and which were not. For instance, with the cup-of-blood guy, we immediately joined his reality. "Yeah, warm this one up for me, will you?" We joined his reality so much that he came to trust us. And then we gave him the task of discovering which parts of his reality other people in the ward could validate for him. We didn't say this was really here and that wasn't, but simply asked him to determine which parts of his reality other people could share. And then he learned—as most of us have as children—to talk about those parts of reality which are either socially acceptable hallucinations, or that other people are willing to see and hear and feel, too. That's all he needed to get out of the hospital. He's doing fine. He still drinks cups of blood, but he does it by himself. Most psychotics just don't have a way of making distinctions between what's shared reality and what's not.
Man: Many psychiatrists do not have that, when working with those people.
Many do not have it, period, as far as I can tell! The only difference is that they have other psychiatrists that share that reality, so they at least have a shared reality. I've made lots of jokes about the way humanistic psychologists treat each other when they get together. They have many social rituals that did not exist when I worked at an electronics corporation. The corporation people didn't come in in the morning and hold each other's hands and look meaningfully into each other's eyes for five and a half minutes. Now, when somebody at the corporation sees somebody do that, they go "Urrrrhhh! Weird!" And the people in humanistic psychology circles think the corporation people are cold and insensitive and inhuman. To me, they are both psychotic realities, and I'm not sure which one is crazier. And if you think about shared realities, the corporation people are in the majority.