Hallucinations of Bodily Sensation

Abstract

The umbrella term “bodily hallucination” refers to a group of widely divergent and only rudimentarily understood corporeal sensations, such as tactile hallucinations, somatic hallucinations, sexual hallucinations, the coenesthesiopathies, proprioceptive hallucinations, kinesthetic hallucinations, vestibular hallucinations, hallucinated pain, and thermal hallucinations. This chapter provides a classification of those various phenomena and highlights what is known about their neurobiological underpinnings. In clinical practice, it may be helpful to let the diagnosis of bodily hallucination depend on the co-occurrence of a delusional explanation by the patient, but even this procedure is not airtight. Future studies seeking to enhance our understanding of these phenomena will have to address – as always, in biomedicine – neurobiological as well as conceptual issues.