Abstract

Auditory hallucinations are common symptomatic manifestations of psychotic states, particularly within the schizophrenia spectrum. For example, Kraepelin already catalogued an extensive array of related phenomena including auditory verbal hallucinations as relevant features of Dementia Praecox. Such phenomena entail a rich and complex architecture that -- according to Jaspers -- is irreducibly linked to an impression of immediacy and quasi-perceptual features. However, both operational psychiatric epistemology and contemporary neuroscientific research tend to interpret the Jaspersian description in a literal and rather concrete way, de facto reducing hallucinatory experiences to mere disordered perceptions. Such percepto-centric conceptualization, besides being theoretically problematic, is also at odds with the experiential features described by schizophrenia spectrum subjects. According to phenomenological psychopathology indeed, AVH are manifestations of a profound, gestaltic transformation of the stream of consciousness that precedes the emergence of florid symptoms.