CEREBROSENSORIAL HALLUCINATION

   The French neologism hallucination cérébrosensorielle was proposed in or shortly before 1884 by the French psychologist Alfred Binet (1857-1911) as a substitute for the term * psychosensorial hallucination. The latter term had been previously introduced by the French alienist Jules Gabriel François Baillarger (1806-1891) to denote a type of hallucination mediated by an interplay between the sense organs and the imagination. As Binet points out, Baillarger's term would seem to suggest that in hallucinations a psychical or mental element is related to the sensorial, similar to the way the soul, in a dualist reading, is related to the body. In Binet's view, this rendition suggests that mental and physical conditions belong to mutually independent ontological categories, and that sensations do not fall into the class of mental events. As Binet argues, "This point of view is obviously untenable; the psychic element of hallucinations depends, equally intimately as the sensorial element, on physiological conditions from which they cannot be separated. To avoid a metaphysical discussion of this subject, it would be preferable to call hallucinations a cerebro-sensorial phenomenon."

   References

   Binet, A. (1884). L'hallucination. Recherches théoriques. Revue Philosophique de la France et de l'Étranger, 9, 377-412.

   Gurney, M. (1885). Hallucinations. Mind, 10, 161-199.