The Function of Hallucinated Pain

Abstract

Functional hallucinations are sensory perceptions for which no physical cause can be assigned. Any sensory modality may he elected to serve as carrier for them; the precise determinates for the selection of modality being imperfectly understood. When the modality is capable of content, the former serves as a vehicle for the latter. The ideational content of hallucination may be expressed in words in the auditory, visual, olfactory, and gustatory modalities of sensation, or indirectly by analogy to sensations reducible to verbal description. In hallucinations of touch, the phenomenon is experienced “ike an electric shock” or “like pins and needles,” or “like bugs crawling”. At the most primitive level hallucinated sensations are perceived free of attached ideational content. These elemental hallucinations are generally painful and are the origin of subsequently elaborated ideation that cluster about them and become a vehicle for anxiety--associated speculation.