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A Missing Link Between Normal Perception and the Hallucination

PETER F. OSTWALD, MD

Arch Gen Psychiatry. 1964;11(1):40-47.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text PDF and any section headings.

Introduction

Patients rarely complain how they perceive the outer world. More often it is what one hears, sees, or smells that causes distress. This may explain why such a frequent and interesting mode of auditory perception—color hearing—does not attract more attention in psychiatry. Individuals who hear in color usually accept this as "normal" and may even find it pleasurable. The color-hearer usually ignores his condition unless questioned or challenged by persons without this capacity for double-sensation. Bleuler, whose monograph on the subject³ preceded his work in schizophrenia, was alerted to his own sound-color synesthesia only after a classmate's casual expression of curious surprise. Some cases of color-hearing are discovered accidentally during psychotherapy.⁵

An investigation of subliminal auditory activity alerted me to this problem of intersensory perception.¹⁷ I found it extraordinarily difficult to fathom what experimental subjects were perceiving in the . . . [Full Text PDF of this Article]

Author Affiliations
SAN FRANCISCO

Assistant Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, University of California School of Medicine, and Attending Psychiatrist, Langley Porter Neuropsychiatric Institute.

Footnotes
Submitted for publication Feb 25, 1964.

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