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Title: Voices of Reason, Voices of Insanity: Studies of Verbal Hallucinations by Ivan Leudar, Philip Thomas ISBN: 0-415-14787-5 Publisher: Brunner-Routledge Pub. Date: 20 June, 2000 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $31.95

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Average Customer Rating: 5 (1 review)

Rating: 5
Summary: Are 'voices' really a sign of madness?
Comment: In this challenging book, psychologist, Ivan Leudar traces voice-hearing and its interpretations through 2,800 years of history. Through six cases of historical and contemporary voice-hearers. Leudar assisted with some contributory chapters by psychiatrist Philip Thomas demonstrates how the direct experience has been changed from being a sign of virtue to being a sign of insanity, signaling 'psychosis' or 'schizoprenia'.

Leudar asks the question if the experience should be taken out of the hands of psychiatry and rehabilitated as a normal, although uncommon human experience.

Leudar lists an impressive number of historically significant voice hearers, including Soctates and Pythagoris. Pointing out that voices were implicated in the religious conversions of St. Augustine and Hildegard of Bingen. Other voice hearers like Galelio, heard the voice of his dead daughter or threatening voices like Daniel Paul Schreiber ( a nineteenth century German judge) who heard voices that boomed abuse at him.

The conclusions that Leudar draws from this fascinating study is that hearing voices is no more insane than other psychological faculties; such as thinking or imagining or seeing. Leudar and Thomas conclude that:

- In general voices are very ordinary and relate to ongoing activites (as with ordinary inner speech). - The voices are typically orientated towards the voice hearer, without direct access to each other or to other people. - Voices typically do not force voice hearers to do things, rather they influence voice hearers' decisions on how to act (an important differentiation) - Voices are not persons in the sense of being capable of reflection - there could be no voices who hear voices. - Most importantly, voice hearers do not mistake 'hallucinatory' voices for other people thinking. They follow, publicly available reality testing procedures to establish their status.

The authors locate the main problem of what voice hearers themselves make of the experience as being one that is caught between 'the rocks of mysticism and pathologisation'. The issue then is a political one and the resolution is to bring back voice-talk back into ordinary everyday life.

This book flies in the face of accepted theories about the meaning of voices and represents an important contribution to the debate about the meaning of voices and indeed mental illness.

A 'must read' for voice hearers and interested professionals wanting to discover a new perspective on this troubling and egmatic experience

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