Supernatural (58 page)

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 such voices come from?
According to Jaynes, from the right side of the brain—the hemisphere which, as we have seen, houses the ‘other self’, Hudson’s ‘subjective mind’.
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 very 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 co-operative 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 20 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 ‘hypnagogic phenomena’—the odd dreams and visions we sometimes experience on the edge of sleep—Van Dusen seems to have turned to the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg, whose
Journal of Dreams
is full of fascinating raw material for the psychiatrist.

Swedenborg described at some length what it was like to be ‘possessed’ by spirits, and Van Dusen was struck by the extraordinary similarity between Swedenborg’s accounts and the hallucinations described by patients in the Mendocino State Hospital.
Swedenborg says that spirits and angels can converse with man directly by entering ‘by an internal way into his organ of hearing, thus affecting it from within’.
Swedenborg goes on: ‘To speak with spirits at this day is rarely granted because it is dangerous.
.
.’, which clearly seems to imply that there was some past age in which men could converse more directly with ‘spirits’.
The explanation Swedenborg gives is that spirits do not normally know ‘they are with man’, because there is a kind of barrier between these entities and man’s own consciousness.
If spirits get through this barrier—or are allowed through because a man has dabbled in ‘the occult’—they are likely to become a nuisance.
‘Evil spirits are such that they regard man with deadly hatred, and desire nothing more than to destroy him, both body and soul.’
Swedenborg also mentions that the barrier between spirits and human consciousness may be broken by people who ‘indulge much in fantasies, so as to remove themselves from the delights proper to the natural man’.
This, says Van Dusen, is a pretty good description of what we now call schizophrenia.
(We should note that schizophrenia does
not
mean ‘split personality’—as the modern misconception has it—but simply a withdrawal from reality.)

‘All of Swedenborg’s observations on the effect of evil spirits entering man’s consciousness conform to my findings,’ says Van Dusen.
And he mentions passages in Swedenborg in which the characteristics of the ‘lower order’ are described: their determination to destroy a man, their ability to cause anxiety or pain, their desire to destroy conscience, their hatred of religion, their tendency to bully, threaten, deceive and lie, and their curious skill at mimicry.
All these characteristics of the ‘lower order’, as experienced by mental patients, are specifically described in the writings of Swedenborg.
Van Dusen was particularly struck by their hatred of religion.
‘If voices are merely the patient’s unconscious coming forth, I would have no reason to expect them to be particularly for or against religion.
Yet the lower order can be counted on to give its most scurrilous comments to any suggestion of religion.’
Swedenborg also notes the obsession of the ‘lower order’ with filth and obscenity, another point noted by Van Dusen.

Van Dusen also observed that although the lower order claim to be individuals, they seldom reveal any trace of real personal identity.
Swedenborg explains that the personal memory is taken from them at death, so they are forced to rely on the memory and abilities of the person they are ‘possessing’.
Another striking similarity between Swedenborg’s spirits and the ‘lower order’ is the attempt to possess some organ or part of the patient’s body.
‘Several worked on one patient’s ear, and he seemed to grow deafer.
One voice worked for two years to capture a patient’s eye, which went visibly out of alignment.’
They often set out to possess the genitals.
‘One female patient described her sexual relations with her male spirit as both more pleasurable and more inward than normal intercourse.’