Daniel B. Smith, the husband of OSFO’s second grade teacher at PS 321, has a book coming out today about the history of auditory hallucinations. The book sounds really interesting — and I’m not saying that because I am hearing any wierd voices in my head. Smith, a Brooklyn-based journalist and author, writes for The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, Granta, and n+1
An excerpt from the book will be in Sunday’s New York Times’ Magazine section. Here’s the blurb from the Penguin Books website.
The strange history of auditory hallucination
throughout the ages, and its power to shed light on the mysterious
inner source of pure faith and unadulterated inspiration.Auditory hallucination is one of the most awe-inspiring, terrifying, and ill-understood tricks the human psyche is capable of. Muses, Madmen, and Prophets
reevaluates 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. Smith’s personal experience with the
phenomenon-his father heard voices, and it was the great torment and
shame of his father’s 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 Smith’s 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.
Well, Mr. Smith’s article in the NY Times was enlightening to me – I would never have thought to call the voices I have sometimes heard “auditory hallucinations.” They were quite real at the time. As a child I heard entire choruses singing wonderful music – loved it! (Usually occurred under a hair dryer for some reason). As an adult, my mother and father’s voices could be quite annoying – but I worked that out. One day I entered my apartment after work and clearly heard my mother’s voice complaining “I know I taught you better than this. Look at this place! Clean it up.” Without a pause, I said aloud, “Well, Mother, if you don’t like it – CLEAN IT UP YOURSELF!” Changed clothes and kicked back. She still visits occasionally – but rarely, as “she” knows her criticisms fall on “empty ears”