Hallucination

In Jean-Paul Sartre’s phenomenological account, hallucination is not adequately described as an inner image projected outward and mistaken for a perception. The hallucinatory object remains irreality’s correlate: what changes is the organization of consciousness around it. Perception may recede, personal synthesis may falter, and a spontaneous but ungraspable appearance may arise; afterward, memory can give that appearance an externality that makes it seem real. This account shifts attention from what a patient appears to see or hear to how the experience is constituted and remembered.

Method and the Hallucinatory Object

Sartre’s starting point is a distinction between describing an image and proposing a theory about its hidden nature. When a person forms an image of Pierre, Pierre—not a little picture lodged inside consciousness—is the object of consciousness. To describe the image as an image requires a second, reflective act: attention turns from the object to the manner in which it is given. For Sartre, this reflection provides certain evidence about the image, whereas explanatory hypotheses about its nature remain probable. The method is to produce images, reflect on them, and describe their distinctive characteristics before explaining them through psychological theory.

That distinction makes hallucination a problem of structure rather than simple misidentification. An image is not a sensory object housed in the mind and then moved into the external world. Its object is already transcendent to consciousness, but it is given as irreal and in a space of its own; an object of perception, by contrast, makes an original claim to reality within the shared spatiotemporal world. Imaging consciousness is also accompanied by a nonthetic awareness of its own spontaneity: it is, in some sense, aware of forming the irreal object. Sartre therefore asks how a patient can believe in the reality of an image without supposing that the image’s constitutive structure has simply turned into perception.

Perception, Irreality, and Apparent Externality

The contrast between perception and imaging is not a contrast between bare sensation and a mental picture added to it. Drawing on Edmund Husserl, Sartre describes perception as an act directed toward a spatiotemporal object, whose present appearance carries unformulated intentions toward aspects not currently seen. An ashtray’s visible upper surface, for instance, implicitly refers to an underside resting on the table. Such intentions enrich the perceived object without positing a separate image. This helps explain why perception gives more than is immediately visible without requiring images to fill gaps in sensation.

Hallucination poses a different problem. The image’s object is already external to consciousness in its own irreal space, so the difficulty is not how an inner content gets projected outward. Nor does a patient’s later report that an apparition was in a room establish that the patient experienced it there as part of ordinary perception. Sartre cautions that reports are not a guarantee that the spaces of perception and image were fused. He notes Pierre Janet’s observation that patients rarely have visual hallucinations in the doctor’s presence, and that systematic attention to the real may exclude them. Some patients can also delay threatening or insulting voices for a few moments by muttering and concentrating on what they are saying.

The account of the soldier Crivelli makes the proposed alternation vivid. In a delirium following war trauma, Crivelli seemed at first to take account of the large room in which the delirium unfolded. Yet when the doctor changed the room’s appearance, the delirium did not change with it. When Professor Dumas called loudly and close by for him to wipe his nose, Crivelli stopped the delirium momentarily and obeyed. Sartre takes these observations to support an alternation between perception and delirium, rather than a stable blending of the hallucinatory scene with the perceived room. He describes hallucination as coinciding with a sudden annihilation of perceived reality: it does not simply occupy the real world alongside perception but excludes it.

Disruption of Personal Synthesis

Sartre does not conclude that hallucination is merely a recital accompanied by the patient’s belief in what is recited. He proposes a hallucinatory act, while emphasizing that its relation to consciousness is not the same in every case. In motor verbal hallucination, patients may know that speech is produced through their own mouths even as they experience the speaking as belonging to someone else. Their knowledge of the bodily action can remain while their global attitude changes. Sartre considers that description insufficient for auditory, visual, and psychic hallucinations, where the central problem is the altered relation between spontaneity, personal unity, and the irreal object.

His broader account locates the change in a weakening or disintegration of personal synthesis. Genuine hallucinations—heard voices or apparitions—arise, he argues, when synthetic, concentrated thought gives way to a diffuse and degraded connection. Personal consciousness vacillates; perception becomes dark and foggy; subject and object recede together. A partial psychic system can then appear without becoming the theme of a unified, attentive consciousness. It is anti-thematic: unlike an ordinary perception that can be inspected, or a thought that can be held at a distance, it cannot be steadily observed. The result is an appearance that is seen but not looked at, or words that are heard but not listened to, and that therefore has a furtive, elusive character.

Sartre distinguishes these events from experiences that patients recognize as imagined. Marie B’s account of a crisis in which she took herself to be the Queen of Spain describes a conviction accompanied by an underlying awareness that the claim was not true. She understood the episode through the analogy of playing a role while knowing it was a role. Such an episode illustrates that an imaginary world can be compelling without being mistaken outright for the real one. Hallucination, by contrast, raises the question of how the relation to irreality is disrupted while the constitutive structure of imaging remains.

From Marginal Appearances to Hallucinatory Memory

Sartre describes a progression from marginal phenomena to more thoroughgoing disintegration. In his account of Sartre’s mescaline experiment, a person singing in a nearby room drew his attention; as he turned his head to listen and ceased looking ahead, three small, parallel clouds appeared. They vanished as soon as he tried to grasp them. The appearance was brief and marginal, incompatible with full, clear visual consciousness, and was recalled as inconsistent and mysterious. Sartre interprets it as an instance of lateral spontaneity rather than a stable perceptual object.

In genuine hallucination, the partial system is more thoroughly detached from concentrated, oriented thought. Its appearance may provoke surprise or horror, and this reaction restores a thematic unity: consciousness awakens, gathers itself, and becomes ready to observe. But by then the irreal object has disappeared. The event is available to experience only through immediate memory, which Sartre describes as unusually concrete and certain. That memory presents the object as external to the current personal consciousness, unforeseeable, and not producible at will—features that resemble the independence of a real-world object.

This remembered externality helps explain why hallucination can be narrated as something seen or heard in the surrounding world. Auditory hallucinations may later be located in a distant town, behind a wall, on the ceiling, under the floor, or beneath a pillow. Following Maurice Lagache, Sartre treats such spatialization as secondary, shaped partly by intellectual data and partly by motor attitudes. A hallucination may be located in relation to real surroundings after the event, when the perceived world has returned; that later placement does not prove that perception and hallucination occupied one shared space during the event itself.

Theoretical Stakes

The difficulty at the heart of Sartre’s account is that the hallucinatory object is constituted as irreal, yet the patient may appear to believe in its reality. Sartre rejects a simple solution in which illness erases the image’s irreality or turns it into a perception. The thesis constitutive of imaging consciousness, he argues, cannot itself be altered: the spontaneity involved in producing an irreal object is inseparable from a nonthetic awareness of that spontaneity. He therefore locates the disturbance in a radical upheaval of consciousness’s attitude toward the irreal and a corresponding weakening of the sense of the real.

This proposal leaves a tension rather than reducing hallucination to a single mechanism. The event is spontaneous, yet may feel imposed; its object retains irreality, yet memory gives it independence and externality; and the patient’s later account may place it in a world whose perception had temporarily collapsed. By keeping these features distinct, Sartre’s analysis resists treating outward behavior or the patient’s report alone as proof that an image was simply confused with a perception. Its emphasis falls instead on the changing relations among imaging, attention, personal synthesis, perception, and memory.