[Psychopathological alteration of the auditory structure in schizophrenia; "the experience of no-sounds"].
According to recent cognitive theories, the greater part of the perceptional meaning and representative meaning are both pre-determined, or pre-organized as a set of meaning, which has a biophysiological and socio-cultural origin. Humans however, drive some kind of sensational Gestalt from each sense organ, and this is incapable of being transformed into language (representative pre-meaning), this enabling us to experience the possibility of truly private meaning in our own right. The author has emphasized this two moments of the meaning, that is, private moments of meaning vs. institutional moments. The author has offered the phenomenological hypothesis of auditory experience and elaborated the relation between these two moments in it. Then, the author has testified its validity in the process of describing and analysing the pathological alteration of auditory sensation in schizophrenia. Auditory space is thought to be differentiated into a three-dimensional structure. That is, a dimension of background, a dimension of signs, and a dimension of symbols, and we accept environmental-sounds, event-sounds, symbolic sounds in each level. Close investigations about 5 schizophrenics revealed that these patients undergo a strange silent experience before the onset of delusional ideas, descriptively and phenomenologically, this phenomenon appeared to be initiated by the deprivation of the dimension of background sounds (referred to as "the experience of no-sounds"). This experiences often occurred especially when they are eager to listen to the surrounding sounds (for example, noises in the neighborhood, classroom chatter), in order to solve their own interpersonal difficulties. Furthermore, the author described the ambivalent nature of patients' thinking in this pathological auditory situation, in which one idea of the polarity of dichotomy was forced to switch to the another one, influenced by an attribute of surrounding sounds. With regard to this aspect, the patients experienced both the physiological changes in the auditory structure as well as the psychological turmoil. The author has emphasized the need to appreciate this ambiguous nature of the psychological context mixed with the physiological context, which is supposed to be very important from psychotherapeutical viewpoint.
Matsunami
K
K
Department of Psychiatry, Tokyo University Branch Hospital.
D000328:Adult; D001307:Auditory Perception; D005260:Female; D006212:Hallucinations; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D012565:Schizophrenic Psychology