Anthropological Perspectives on Hallucination and Hallucinogens
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CHAPTER ONE ANTHROPOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES ON HALLUCINATION AND HALLUCINOGENS WESTON LA BARRE, Ph.D. IDENTIFICATION AND DEFINITION OF DATA Because of great cultural variety in concepts and social contexts regarding certain mental states which, moreover, are easily confused with one another, it is impor- tant to delimit the phenomena we seek to discuss. The etymology of terms, it is presently seen, is already an exercise in cross-cultural ideology. "Illusion" is a false mental appearance made by some actual external cause acting on the senses but capable of conceptual correction. Thus mistaking a tree in the dark for a man is an illusion, of which the subject may be disabused by various forms of reality testing; emphasis is on the ready correctability of an illusion. "Delusion" isa fixed false concept occasioned by external stimuli; but these stimuli are so consistently misconstrued that delusion remains largely insusceptible to correction. Thus a strongly held belief that one's food is "poisoned," based on some imagined taste or appearance, is a delusion. Both illusion and delusion are based on the Latin ludere, "to play." Illusion implies the innocent subjective misinterpretation and exists only in the form of a noun state. But to delude, as a transitive verb, means sometimes intentionally to befool the mind orjudgment, to make sport of, beguile, or mislead. "Delusion" falls easily into a demonological view of causality, as of some ill-intentioned external anima or spirit actively deceiving the subject-a view rejected by modern psychology, which sees the subject "projecting" demons as a way of disclaiming psychic responsibility for his own thought productions. In this sense one is always self-deluded. Illusion and delusion vary along a vector of increasing psychological intensity, subjective needfulness, and relative incorrectability. These features are dynamically impor- tant, both psychiatrically and cross-culturally. "Hallucination" derives from the Latin deponent or half-passive verb alucinari, "to wander in mind"-again dependent on archaic animistic notions to which modern psychology does not subscribe. In careful present-day usage, hallucina- tion indicates a false appearance, in sensory form, hence seemingly external, but occasioned by an internal condition of the mind, the central suggestion of the term 9 10 Anthropological Perspectives on Hallucination and Hallucinogens being its subjectivity and groundlessness. Hallucinations can occur in any sensory modality, whether visual, auditory, olfactory, gustatory, tactile, or kinesthetic, and they may sometimes be synesthetic-that is, input in one sensory modality is perceived in terms of another, as when a peyotist hears the sun come up with a roar, or when ritual drumming lifts the hearer up into the air. Since all men are accustomed to believe their senses, it is the sensory form of its presentation that gives hallucination its psychic conviction. Two other terms must be examined before we travel cross-culturally: posses- sion and trance."Possession" implies the now wholly inadmissible demonological notion that the body in such a state is possessed or held by an invading alien spirit. "Trance" derives from Latin transitus, "a passage," in turn from transire, "to pass over," namely, to go into another psychic state, to swoon half-dead, to undergo rapture (being taken away) or ecstasy (the soul's standing outside the body). The word again is entangled with false animistic notions now discarded, but in medicine "trance" is still used to designate a cataleptic or hypnotic state of partial consciousness and high suggestibility. These etymologies already descry comparative ethnography along a time line within a Western tradition. But to use any of these terms uncritically isto be victim of archaic thought categories. It is therefore scholastic fecklessness and confusion further to divide "possession" into supposed subtypes, as some students have done, when we no longer espouse the ideology of possession itself. The notion of an ec-static or body-separable soul (brainless mind or organism less life) that can wander in space and time has long since been banished from psychology, and all the supposed attributes of the soul can be better explained in terms of the sciences (La Barre, 1954, pp. 267-302; La Barre, 1972a, pp. 367-374). Similarly, with such ethnographic complexes as shamanism, ancient and near- universal in the world, we should note that the only valid subdivisions of shaman (black and white, bird and reindeer) are those provided by natives themselves. To label shamans genuine or false is to foment bogus problems, since we do not accede to shamanistic suppositions themselves. For us properly to perceive diverse ethnographic phenomena all the way from Haitian oodiin. to Amerindian vision quest requires conceptual clarity and awareness of our own cognitive maps. It is better to use our own experiment-derived terms to maintain self-critical control of theory and implication. A few other terms that disclose ethnographymay be examined. "Revelation" refers to a supposed human contact with a "supernatural" world, whether this contact is through trance, vision, possession, or whatever. In this sense of course all religions are "revealed," and all our alleged information about the super- natural is only the statements made about this realm by self-designated au- thorities: shamans and visionaries, prophets and priests, and other "seers." A "vision" is a seen hallucination, and since sight is the predominant sense in primates, both dreams and hallucinations are ordinarily visual. Prophecy is to "speak forth" with the voice of the god or spirit, whose "medium" or mere porteparole the inspired ("breathed into") enthusiast ("god-inside-belabored") may temporarily be. "Divination" makes statements of supposed fact in past, present, or future time through the aid of spirit-helpers. "Prognostication" is spirit-given "foreknowledge" of events or alleged precognition. "Clairvoyance" is to "see clearly" beyond the range in space and time of the workaday mind and eye. All Scientific Considerations 11 these alleged phenomena can be subsumed under subsequent scientific descrip- tion and, accepted as fantasies, can serve psychiatric understanding. SCIENTIFIC CONSIDERATIONS It is evident that any sound cross-cultural understanding has awaited the dis- cernment of an authentic and verifiably cross-cultural phenomenon. This neces- sary psychological tool is afforded by new understanding of the dream. The dream is not only a pan-human psychic state (Lincoln, 1935; La Barre, 1958, p. 316,fn. 55; Eggan, 1949; Eggan, 1961, pp. 551-557); it occurs in all the warm- blooded mammals and birds so far investigated. We are far from a complete knowledge of the physiological and psychological functions of the dream. Nonetheless, present understanding of the dream profoundly illuminates a whole universe of human beliefs and social institutions; such understanding embraces both the revolutionary psychiatric insights of Freud and the new experimental psychology of REM states (Aserinsky and Kleitman, 1953; Dement, 1954; Fisher, 1956; Dement and Kleitman, 1957a, 1957b; Dement, 1960; Kleitman, 1961, 1963; Fisher and Dement, 1963; Dement and Fisher, 1963; Dement, 1965a, 1965b; Dement and Greenberg, 1966; Dement el al., 1966; Roffwarg et aI., 1966; Hartmann, 1973). As a first rough approximation, the human mind can be said to exist in two relatively distinct and differing states of being: wakefulness and sleep. The major difference between them is that the waking mind ordinarily has full access to sensory input, hence is adaptively environment-oriented. It is highly significant that in experimental "sensory deprivation"(Bexton et al., 1954; Lilly, 1956; Solomon, 1958; Vernon et al., 1958; Goldberger and Holt, 1958; Wexler et al., 1958; Cohen et aI., 1959; Wheaton, 1959; Freedman and Greenblatt, 1960; Freedman et al., 1961; Silverman et al., 1961;Solomon et al., 1961; Solomon and Mendelson, 1962; Brownfield, 1965; Zubek, 1969)-as in a subject suspended in a tank of body-warm water as isolated and shielded from all sensory stimuli as possible, thus deprived of customary complex information from the outside world-the wakeful mind promptly begins to project its own contents onto the blank screen of consciousness. In a word, the individual hallucinates. In ordinary sleep the mind is by some neural process normally cut off from sensory input. Mental activity continues in ordinary sleep, with a momentum still fairly realistic and matter of fact, although thoughts are somewhat apocopated and fragmentary. But in the REM state of "paradoxical sleep" there erupts an extraordinary discontinuity with the waking state and even with ordinary sleep. Objectively, and visibly to the observer, the sleeper displays a curious rapid eye movement (hence the acronym REM), a restless skittering of the eyeballs behind closed lids-as if, psychologically, a "seer" were seeing without sight. Subjectively, the sleeper "dreams," as can easily be ascertained by awakening him during the REM state. By EEG measurements and other psychophysical signs the brain is more furiously active in the REM state than it ever is when the subject is awake. Paradoxical sleep is paradoxical indeed. In the REM state the mind seems to "be in business for itself'-and the outside real world takes the hindmost. Aristotle long ago observed that dreams lack the element of criticaljudgment (to epikn.non) 12 Anthropological Perspectives on Hallucination and Hallucinogens (La Barre, 1972a, pp. 55-60). Deprived of edifying restraint and editing by environing reality, in this state too, as in simple sensory deprivation, the central nervous system hallucinates. REM sleep is a "spree of the id"-a freewheeling of the central nervous system in a kind of "primary process thinking" otherwise most visiblein dereistic schizophrenic fantasy. Indeed, Kant suggested that "the lunatic is a wakeful dreamer," and Schopenhauer that "a dream is a short-lasting psychosis, and a psychosis is a long-lasting dream" (Moreau de Tours, 1845; Rosenzweig, 1959, pp. 326-329; Katan, 1960; Kleitman, 1963, p. 106; La Barre, 1972a, pp. 67-68; Fisher, in Kleitman, 1973, p. 50).