Auditory verbal hallucinations--breaking the silence of inner dialogue

Abstract

Auditory verbal hallucinations (AVHs) are usually defined as perceptions of speech that occur in the absence of any appropriate external stimulus. This definition, we argue, is false. We maintain that AVHs are disorders of self-consciousness that are best understood as the becoming conscious of inner dialogue. Normally, subconscious interior conversations are experienced as a sense of partnership between distinct parts: we feel these parts as distinct, but also integrated and collaborating with each other in decision-making and in self-representation. AVHs attest to a breakdown in this process of interior conversation: the feeling of unity in duality falls apart, and the dialectic partnership on which self-representation is grounded shatters into a mere dichotomy. There is a fracture in self-consciousness. If ipseity (i.e. the prereflective modality of self-awareness, the self-feeling of one's own self in which the one who feels and what is felt is but one thing) is lacking, the sense of unity weakens, and the sense of duality increases. This crisis of ipseity is accompanied by an increase of reflexivity (i.e. the process through which I take a part of myself as a focal object of awareness). Hyperreflexivity contributes to the objectification of the sense of duality and to the loss of the sense of 'myness' of inner speech. In schizophrenics, inner dialogue becomes anomalously manifest. Whereas in normal conditions, inner dialogue is the medium for self-representation, AVHs arise through its morbid objectification: inner speech comes to the foreground in the concrete fashion of alien 'voices'.