‘Most patients soon realise that they are having experiences that others do not share, and for this reason learn to keep quiet about them. Many suffer insults, threats and attacks for years from voices with no one around them aware of it.’
Perhaps Van Dusen’s most significant finding is that he learned that his patients seemed to experience two distinct kinds of ‘voices’; he speaks of these as the ‘higher order’ and the ‘lower order’:
‘Lower order voices are similar to drunken bums at a bar who like to tease and torment just for the fun of it. They suggest lewd acts and then scold the patient for considering them. They find a weak point of conscience, and work on it interminably. For instance, one man heard voices teasing him for three years over a ten cent debt he had already paid. They call the patient every conceivable name, suggest every lewd act, steal memories or ideas right out of consciousness, threaten death, and work on the patient’s credibility in every way. For instance, they brag that they will produce some disaster on the morrow and then claim credit for one in the daily paper. They suggest foolish acts, such as raise your right hand in the air and stay that way, and tease if he does it and threaten him if he doesn’t.’
In fact, it seems clear that these ‘lower order’ hallucinations behave exactly like bored children with nothing better to do.
‘The vocabulary and range of ideas of the lower order is limited, but they have a persistent will to destroy. They invade every nook and cranny of privacy, work on every weakness and belief, claim awesome powers, make promises, and then undermine the patient’s will . . .’
‘A few ideas can be repeated endlessly. One voice just said ‘hey’ for months while the patient tried to figure out whether ‘hey’ or ‘hay’ was meant. Even when I was supposedly speaking to an engineer . . . the engineer was unable to do any more arithmetic than simple sums . . . The lower order voices seem incapable of sequential reasoning. Though they often claim to be in some distant city, they cannot report more than the patient hears, sees or remembers. They seem imprisoned in the lowest level of the patient’s mind . . .’
The ‘lower order’, then, are basically tormenters. But about one fifth of the hallucinations seem to be of a higher order, and they, on the other hand, seem concerned with helping the patient. The ‘higher order’ is much more likely to be symbolic, religious, supportive, genuinely instructive; it can communicate directly with the inner feelings of the patient. It is similar to Jung’s archetypes, whereas the ‘lower order’ is like Freud’s id. Van Dusen mentions a case of a gaspipe fitter who experienced a ‘higher-order’ hallucination of a lovely woman who entertained him while showing him thousands of symbols: ‘. . . his female vision showed a knowledge of religion and myth far beyond the patient’s comprehension.’ After Van Dusen had been holding a dialogue with this ‘higher-order’ hallucination, the gaspipe fitter asked for just one clue to what they had been talking about.
Van Dusen reports that he has been told by these ‘higher-order’ beings ‘that the purpose of the lower order is to illuminate all of the person’s weaknesses’. And the purpose—or one of the purposes—of the ‘higher order’ seems to be to protect people against the ‘lower order’:
‘This contrast may be illustrated by the experiences of one man. He had heard the lower order arguing for a long while about how they would murder him. He also had a light come to him at night, like the sun. He knew it was a different order because the light respected his freedom and would withdraw if it frightened him. In contrast, the lower order worked against his will, and would attack if it could sense fear in him. This rarer higher order seldom speaks, whereas the lower order can talk endlessly.’
While the ‘lower order’ ‘is consistently nonreligious and anti-religious’, jeering angrily at the least mention of religion, the ‘higher order’ ‘appeared strangely gifted, sensitive, wise and religious’.
Van Dusen made one extremely striking observation about the hallucinations. Although he was able to observe a very large number of them over the years, he soon realised that ‘after 20 patients, there wasn’t much to be learned’ because the hallucinations were all so similar. This in itself seems baffling. After all, one would expect to find as many different types of hallucination as there are people. For example, one might expect vets to have hallucinations that claim to be talking animals, engineers to be tormented by talking machines, gardeners to be haunted by talking plants or trees, librarians by talking books, dentists by talking sets of false teeth. Nothing of the sort. The ‘lower-order’ hallucinations were all strikingly similar; so were those of the ‘higher order’. This either implies some basic similarity in the part of our minds that create hallucinations, or something far stranger . . .
Van Dusen is inclined to believe in something far stranger. Through his interest in ‘hypnagogic phenomena’—the odd dreams and visions we sometimes experience on the edge of sleep—Van Dusen seems to have turned to the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg, whose Journal of Dreams is full of fascinating raw material for the psychiatrist.
Swedenborg described at some length what it was like to be ‘possessed’ by spirits, and Van Dusen was struck by the extraordinary similarity between Swedenborg’s accounts and the hallucinations described by patients in the Mendocino State Hospital. Swedenborg says that spirits and angels can converse with man directly by entering ‘by an internal way into his organ of hearing, thus affecting it from within’. Swedenborg goes on: ‘To speak with spirits at this day is rarely granted because it is dangerous. . .’, which clearly seems to imply that there was some past age in which men could converse more directly with ‘spirits’. The explanation Swedenborg gives is that spirits do not normally know ‘they are with man’, because there is a kind of barrier between these entities and man’s own consciousness. If spirits get through this barrier—or are allowed through because a man has dabbled in ‘the occult’—they are likely to become a nuisance. ‘Evil spirits are such that they regard man with deadly hatred, and desire nothing more than to destroy him, both body and soul.’ Swedenborg also mentions that the barrier between spirits and human consciousness may be broken by people who ‘indulge much in fantasies, so as to remove themselves from the delights proper to the natural man’. This, says Van Dusen, is a pretty good description of what we now call schizophrenia. (We should note that schizophrenia does not mean ‘split personality’—as the modern misconception has it—but simply a withdrawal from reality.)
‘All of Swedenborg’s observations on the effect of evil spirits entering man’s consciousness conform to my findings,’ says Van Dusen. And he mentions passages in Swedenborg in which the characteristics of the ‘lower order’ are described: their determination to destroy a man, their ability to cause anxiety or pain, their desire to destroy conscience, their hatred of religion, their tendency to bully, threaten, deceive and lie, and their curious skill at mimicry. All these characteristics of the ‘lower order’, as experienced by mental patients, are specifically described in the writings of Swedenborg. Van Dusen was particularly struck by their hatred of religion. ‘If voices are merely the patient’s unconscious coming forth, I would have no reason to expect them to be particularly for or against religion. Yet the lower order can be counted on to give its most scurrilous comments to any suggestion of religion.’ Swedenborg also notes the obsession of the ‘lower order’ with filth and obscenity, another point noted by Van Dusen.
Van Dusen also observed that although the lower order claim to be individuals, they seldom reveal any trace of real personal identity. Swedenborg explains that the personal memory is taken from them at death, so they are forced to rely on the memory and abilities of the person they are ‘possessing’. Another striking similarity between Swedenborg’s spirits and the ‘lower order’ is the attempt to possess some organ or part of the patient’s body. ‘Several worked on one patient’s ear, and he seemed to grow deafer. One voice worked for two years to capture a patient’s eye, which went visibly out of alignment.’ They
often set out to possess the genitals. ‘One female patient described her sexual relations with her male spirit as both more pleasurable and more inward than normal intercourse.’
There is an equally striking correspondence between the ‘higher order’ described by mental patients and the entities Swedenborg calls ‘angels’. The angels are kind, helpful and wise. The reason that they are so sparing of words is that man’s ‘interior mind’ does not think in words, but in ‘universals which comprise many particulars’—that is to say, in intuitive insights. They are, in short, a right-brain function. Or, to put it another way, ‘angels’ communicate through the right cerebral hemisphere, and prefer symbols—we may recollect Van Dusen’s gaspipe fitter who was shown hundreds of universal symbols in an hour by his ‘higher order’ mentor. Swedenborg also notes that ‘higher order’ spirits can see the lower ones, but not vice versa—which again corresponded to Van Dusen’s own experience.
Van Dusen was inclined to wonder why ‘higher-order’ hallucinations are so much rarer than those of the ‘lower order’ (approximately one fifth as many). Swedenborg suggests an answer. Angels, he says, possess the very interior of man, and their ‘influx is tacit’. So they are simply less apparent than the hostile spirits, who make sure their presence is recognised. What are we to make of all this? Both Crabtree and Van Dusen insist that they try to function solely as observers, implying that the reader can choose which explanation he prefers—spirits or the unconscious mind. But we have seen that Van Dusen is inclined to wonder why, if the ‘lower order’ is merely the patient’s unconscious, they should show such consistent hostility to religion. And how can we explain the following story from Crabtree’s book? An acquaintance of Crabtree’s called Pat was invited by a girlfriend to spend a weekend at her grandparents’ farm. The grandparents turned out to be dabblers in the occult, and parts of the house, such as the attic, gave Pat peculiar feelings of uneasiness. Later, the grandparents suggested that Pat should try automatic writing, which she did with some misgivings. The moment she took the pen in her hand and relaxed, she slipped into a drugged, trance-like state, and experienced a numbness in her hand and arm. She seemed to see a woman who appeared behind her; the woman had a doll-like face, and wore a long mauve gown. Pat felt as though her energies were being usurped by this woman, and suddenly her hand wrote: ‘Elizabeth Barrett Browning here.’ (Her hosts had earlier mentioned Elizabeth Barrett Browning.) There followed a long message which included the information that Mrs Browning and Robert were having difficulty getting used to their ‘new surroundings’. Slowly, the energy seemed to diminish until the writing stopped. But Pat felt oddly dissociated for the rest of the day.
Later that evening a second session was held. This time several different ‘entities’ used Pat’s hand to write, and the messages were of a ‘coarse nature’. At a third session, ‘Mrs Browning’ answered the question ‘Where do you live now?’ ‘Everywhere . . . nowhere. We are you and you are us.’ After that she seemed to become very cagey.
Then the handwriting changed to that of Pat’s deceased brother Tom, and there was a message of love and comfort. But when Pat said how moved she felt, her girlfriend snapped: ‘That wasn’t Tom. They’ll pretend to be anyone.’ Evidently she knew a great deal about ‘lower-order’ entities.
Later, one of the grandparents remarked that some entity no longer seemed to be in the house; it had left because it was attracted to Pat’s aura. Pat was disturbed at the thought that she had been used as a kind of sponge to soak up some dubious force.
Back home again, Pat began to hear ‘Elizabeth’ ’s voice inside her head, and she felt oddly detached from reality. ‘Elizabeth’ tried to persuade her to do more automatic writing, but she felt that if she did this, she would only be consolidating the ‘spirit’s’ hold. ‘We need you’, said ‘Elizabeth’. ‘If you refuse to speak to us we shall live in your room, in your walls.’
Pat’s girlfriend had told her that if she ignored the entity, it would soon go away. She found that it was not as easy as that. She tried reading a trashy novel and ignoring the voice, but a sensation that someone was pressing her face against her own made it hard to concentrate. In bed she tossed and turned so violently that she had to remake the bed several times. But she felt that her ‘starvation’ technique was the right one. After a few days, her ability to concentrate began to return; slowly, little by little, the influence of the entities (for she felt there was more than one) began to diminish. Finally, she had the impression that she could actually see the woman in the mauve dress receding, turning first into a mauve mass, then into a ‘low grade vibration’.
Pat may have been very suggestible, and her unconscious mind may have created the woman in mauve, but it must be admitted that this explanation seems less convincing than the alternative—that Pat had willingly opened herself to one of the ‘lower order’, and had to extricate herself as best she could. Descriptions of this type of possession are familiar in ‘occult’ literature. The American researcher Alan Vaughan describes how he himself became ‘possessed’ for a time. He had bought himself a ouija board, to amuse a friend who was convalescing. Soon he was receiving all kinds of messages, some of which seemed to convey information that was not available to Vaughan’s own unconscious mind—for example, when the radio announced the death of the newspaper columnist Dorothy Kilgallen, from a heart attack, they asked the board if this was true; it replied that she had actually died of poison. Ten days later, this proved to be true. (It was suspected—and still is—that she died because she knew too much about the John F. Kennedy assassination.) Then, to his alarm, Vaughan found that a spirit who called itself ‘Nada’ (‘nothing’—recalling ‘Elizabeth’ ‘s answer to the question about where she lived) had ‘got inside his head’. ‘I could hear her voice repeating the same phrases over and over again’—in the typical manner of the ‘lower order’. When asked about this, the board replied: ‘Awful consequences—possession.’
A friend who understood such matters undertook to help Vaughan, and another ‘spirit’ took possession of his hand and made him write a message: ‘Each of us has a spirit while living. Do not meddle with the spirits of the dead.’ Then the spirit seemed to cause an uprising of energy in Vaughan’s body which pushed both ‘Nada’ and the helpful entity out of the top of Vaughan’s head:
‘I felt a tremendous sense of elation and physical wellbeing . . . My mind began to race in some extended dimension that knew no confines of time or space. For the first time, I began to sense what was going on in other people’s minds, and, to my astonishment, I began to sense the future through some kind of extended awareness . . .’1
Here again, we can see that Vaughan’s account seems to tally closely with what Swedenborg had to say about angels and spirits. ‘Nada’ repeated the same phrases over and over again, as the ‘lower order’ always do. She identified herself as the wife of a Nantucket sea captain, and Vaughan remarks that she seemed to resent the fact that he was alive and she was dead. The entity that helped to push ‘Nada’ out of Vaughan’s head sounds very much like one of Swedenborg’s angels.
But could not both entities have been a product of Vaughan’s ‘right brain’, as Julian Jaynes suggests? This is conceivable; yet again, there does seem to be a distinction between the manifestations of the right brain, and ‘lower order’ entities. The right brain is the intuitive self—the aspect of us that provides insight and ‘inspiration’—such as the tunes that ‘walked into’ Mozart’s head. It has better things to do than repeat the same stupid phrase over and over again.
The distinction can be seen clearly in a case I have described elsewhere,2 that of Brad Absetz, an American teacher living in Finland, who accidentally stumbled upon the trick of establishing contact with his ‘other self. After the death of their child from cancer, Brad Absetz’s wife retreated into a state of schizophrenia. For hours at a time, she would lie on the bed, her eyes closed, struggling with guilt and depression. Brad would lie there beside her, wa
iting for her to emerge from these sessions of gloomy introspection so he could comfort and encourage her. He lay totally alert, waiting for the slightest movement that would indicate that she was returning to normal awareness. Yet clearly, a man who lies on a bed for hours at a time will drift into a state of relaxation. One day, as he lay there in this combined state of relaxation and alertness, he experienced a curious sense of inner freedom, of release from the body, almost as if floating clear of the bed. Then he noticed an impulse in the muscles of his arm, as if it wanted to move. Brad mentally gave his arm ‘permission to move’, and it floated up into the air. Soon both arms were making spontaneous movements, while he looked on as a bystander.
In the dining hall, where buffet meals were served, his hands showed a disposition to select food for themselves; for several weeks, he allowed them to select the food they preferred—it was seldom what he would have chosen himself—and noticed that he began to lose weight, and to feel fitter than ever before. His ‘hand’ later used crayons and paints to create an extraordinary series of paintings, and to make metal sculptures. It also began to write poems in free-verse form, and these poems were remarkable for a certain clarity and purity of language.
What had happened is that the right-brain self had begun to express itself; we might say that in the parliament of his mind, the member for the unconscious had worked up the courage to start making speeches. Psychologists refer to the right brain as the ‘non-dominant hemisphere’; in most of us, it behaves like a suppressed housewife who never dares to utter her own opinion. Brad’s hours of quiescence had taught her to overcome her shyness.