Daniel B. Smith - Muses, Madmen, and Prophets: Rethinking the History, Science, and Meaning of Auditory Hallucination
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Auditory hallucination is one of the most awe-inspiring, terrifying, and ill-understood tricks the human psyche is capable of.Muses, Madmen, and Prophetsreevaluates the popular conception of the phenomenon today and through the ages, and reveals the roots of the medical understanding and treatment of it. It probes history, literature, anthropology, psychology, and neurology to explain and demystify the experience of hearing voices, in a fascinating and at times funny quest for understanding. Daniel B. Smiths personal experience with the phenomenon-his father heard voices, and it was the great torment and shame of his fathers life-and his discovery that some people learn to live in peace with their voices fuels this contemplative, brilliantly researched, and inspired book.
Science has not been able to fully explain the phenomenon of auditory hallucination. It is a condition that has existed perhaps as long as we have-there is evidence of it in literature and even pre-literate oral histories from across all times and cultures. Smith presents the sophisticated and radical argument that a negative side effect of living as we do in this great age of medical science is that we have come to limit this phenomenon to nothing more than a biochemical glitch for which the only proper response is medical, pharmaceutical treatment. This pathological assumption can inflict great harm on the people who hear voices by ignoring the meaning and reality of the experience for them. But it also obscures from the rest of us a rich wellspring of knowledge about the essential source of faith and inspiration.
As Smith examines the many incidences of people who have famously heard voices throughout history-Moses, Mohammed, Teresa of Avila, Joan of Arc, Rilke, William Blake, Socrates, and others-he considers the experience of auditory hallucination in light of its relationship to the nature of pure faith and as the key to the source of artistic inspiration. At the heart of Smiths exploration into the many extraordinary, strange, sometimes frightening and sometimes almost supernatural aspects of auditory hallucination is his driving personal need to comprehend an experience that, when considered in good faith, is as profound and complex as human consciousness itself.
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*I can still summon the virulent buzz of that bulb, sounding like a swarm of bees, the scalding heat that I always imagined was about to ignite the New York Times my father read beneath it during his early-morning treatments, and the dizzying white solar glow of the dining room lit up by the lamp. It was too bright to face; one had to look away or flee to another room.
*The word elenctic, an adjectival form deriving from the Greek word elenchus, refers to the ostensibly salutary form of argument to which Socrates exposed his interlocutors, commonly referred to as Socratic.
MUSES, MADMEN, AND PROPHETS
Daniel B. Smith is a New Yorkbased journalist and author. His work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, Granta, and n+1.
HEARING VOICES
AND THE BORDERS
OF SANITY
PENGUIN BOOKS
PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.
Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephens Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi110 017, India Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa
Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices:
80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
First published in the United States of America by The Penguin Press,
a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. 2007
Published in Penguin Books 2008
Copyright Daniel B. Smith, 2007
All rights reserved
Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint the following copyrighted works:
Floating and excerpt from Denmark from Visits from the Seventh: Poems by Sarah Arvio. Copyright 2002 by Sarah Arvio. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.
Excerpt from An Interview with John Berryman, The Harvard Advocate , October 27, 1968. By permission of the publisher.
Excerpt from Its the End of the World According to Carp by Edward Helmore, The Observer (London). By permission of the author.
Excerpt from The Works and Days, Theogony, The Shield of Herakles by Hesiod, translated by Richmond Lattimore (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press). Copyright 1959 by the University of Michigan, renewed 1987 by Alice Lattimore. By permission of the publisher.
Excerpt from The Iliad of Homer, translated by Richmond Lattimore. By permission of The University of Chicago Press.
Excerpt from Men and Ideas: History, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance by Johan Huizinga, translated by James S. Holmes and Hans van Marle. Copyright 1959 by Meridian Books and The Free Press. Reprinted by permission of Princeton University Press.
Excerpt from Four for Sir John Davies from The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke. Copyright 1953 by Theodore Roethke. Used by permission of Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc.
THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS HAS CATALOGED THE HARDCOVER EDITION AS FOLLOWS :
Smith, Daniel B., 1977
Muses, madmen, and prophets: rethinking the history, science, and meaning of auditory hallucination / by Daniel B. Smith.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN: 978-1-1012-0212-8
1. Auditory hallucinations. I. Title.
RC553.A84S65 2007
616.89dc22 2006050653
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publishers prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the authors rights is appreciated.
TO THE MEMORY OF
LEONARD JAY SMITH
(19451998)
There are two voices, and the first voice says, Write! And the second voice says, For whom?And the first voice says, For the dead whom thou didst love.
JOHN BERRYMAN , quoting Kierkegaard,
who is in turn quoting Hamann
PRELUDE
THE PATHOLOGICAL ASSUMPTION
INTERLUDE
LISTENING
INTERLUDE
FLOATING
PERSONAL DEITY
SOCRATES VERSUS THE STATE
DIGNA VOX
JOAN OF ARC VERSUS THE CHURCH
MORBID OFFSPRING
DANIEL PAUL SCHREBER VERSUS PSYCHIATRY
POSTLUDE
HEARING VOICES
H earing voices when no source can be found or when no one else does is an ancient, multifaceted experience. It reaches back into the prehistoric archeological record and stretches forward to the present day. It appears in timeless religious texts that we read again and again, and in newspaper articles that we read once and then discard. It evokes insanity (to most people), but it also evokes poetry and God and the physics of sound. It occurs in cultures in all regions of the Earth and is an appropriate topic of study for an array of disciplines, including psychiatry, psychology, neurology, philosophy, anthropology, theology, and linguistics.
Muses, Madmen, and Prophets takes many of these aspects of the experience into account. This was not something that I had originally planned. When I first began to read and think about voice-hearingthe convenient name that I will frequently use for the phenomenon throughout this bookall I knew was that it was a symptom of psychiatric illness. I soon learned that this was a simplistic understanding. Just below the popular interpretation there was a sea of voices clamoring for a hearing. The intention of this book is to provide one.
The book wont do so thoroughly. It cant. The experience is quite simply too diverse to cover in a single work, particularly one of modest length. The reader should therefore be aware that I have been selective. The most important cut Ive made in the material is cultural. There is a fascinating anthropological literature on voice-hearing in African, Asian, and Native American societies, but I have limited myself to voices as they exist in the history of the West: North America and Western Europe. The only exceptions to this rule are those cases in which a cultural comparison or outside fact is useful in making a specific point or where the history of the West can be located only outside its geographical boundariesas in the birth and growth of the worlds major monotheistic religions in the Near East.
I hope readers will enjoy discovering what Ive chosen to includeinevitably a more fraught set of judgmentsas they proceed, just as I have been cheered by the heterogeneity of the subject. Before they do so, however, it will be helpful for readers to know that this book itself is written in three different voices. This aspect of Muses, Madmen, and Prophets is due to what I perceived early on to be three different demands made upon me by the material.
The first demand was intellectual. The vast majority of the literature on voice-hearing is academic in tone. Voice-hearing is an unusual and mysterious experience: Why do people hear voices? What does it mean? Where does it come from? For centuries, these questions have led authors to dissect, probe, and categorize the experience in the hope of better understanding it. In order to synthesize and present this material to the reader, Ive had to take something of a similar approach in several chapters.
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