ABSTRACT
Over the years from Esquirol to Henri Ey (1973) many works on hallucination have appeared. For the most part, these are accounts of hallucinations in schizophrenia or states of delirium and drug intoxication, really little more than a catalog of hallucinatory forms with no attempt to relate the hallucination to perceptual physiology or regional brain function. The result has been a complex phenomenology, a few pseudo-theories, a lack of neurological hypotheses and much scholarly disputation. The one thing that is clear from this work is that an approach to the problem of hallucination should be grounded, not in the symptom content, which is too rich for interpretation, but on patterns of hallucinatory experience. If such patterns can be identified, and can be shown to correspond with damage to specific brain areas, they may be comprehensible in terms of a general theory of perception (Brown 1983b).
