Historique et actualité du concept d’« hallucination négative »

Abstract

The significant association “negative hallucination” seems paradoxical. How is it possible to hallucinate about nothing? From Bernheim to Freud, Ey to Green as well as Lacan, negative hallucination has been the subject of much debate between productivity and negative reaction. We will reconsider this historical progression by clarifying the concepts. If the problem of negative hallucination has been regularly described as a cardinal point of psychopathology, no author has really developed a specific theory clarifying this clinical phenomenon. For us today, the term negative hallucination highlights a specific defence mechanism, referring neither to repression nor projection, but explaining the representation of absence of representation which characterizes the clinical aspect of the traumatic moment. At the time of the terror, the subject's inability to recognize their subjective involvement in the traumatic scene leads to an attempted de-subjectification, possibly protective of a much deeper depatterning at first, but which will soon reinforce the revivifications which seem to impose themselves from the exterior. Although the trauma and the post-traumatic reaction may be expressions of psychosis, and some authors have argued that “post-traumatic neurosis” is undoubtedly not neurosis, the concept of negative hallucination unites these clinical phenomena. The subject cannot repress or directly represent the trauma, so they represent the absence of representation by an occasional significant void, which can only remain temporary as long as this defensive mechanism of de-subjectification is overcome.