ABSTRACT
Until the French psychiatrist Jean-Étienne Dominique Esquirol gave them their current name, hallucinations – seeing or hearing things that are not there – were called “apparitions”. is captures their profoundly disturbing nature, an eeriness that is not fully refl ected in the defi nition Oliver Sacks quotes from William James’s classic e Principles of Psychology (1890): “An hallucination is a strictly sensational form of consciousness, as good and true a sensation as if there were a real object there. e object happens to be not there, that is all” (2012: x). Unlike mental images, hallucinations do not remain obediently inside your head – they are projected into the world that surrounds you – and they can surprise. Having a life of their own, which reinforces their compelling reality, they are intimate invasions that break into your chosen biography rather than belonging to it.
