Verbal hallucinations in psychotic patients

"Verbal hallucinations" are sentences that psychotic patients may say repeatedly throughout a conversation which are out of context or unconnected to the topic of conversation. These hallucinations are not the outcome of a remembrance of an experience or an event and do not bring about any emotional relief or catharsis, but they supply valuable information. They resemble Jacques Lacan's description of the psychotic mechanism "Forclusion." This mechanism relates to experiences that did not undergo the process of primary symbolization through language, and experiences where words were attached but were not bound to the language structure. The result being that these experiences did not enter into the unconscious discourse of the subject. This information can reappear as verbal hallucinations in the psychotic patient. In such cases, the therapist, with the assistance of the patient's family, must investigate the meaning of the verbal hallucinations through research into the patient's and family's history in the phase prior to language development. When such a connection is discovered, the therapist must then bridge the hallucinations with the events unknown to the patient but contained in his subconscious. The therapist's role in such cases resembles that of a parent with a child: To translate the subject's experience through language from the physical schema to the body image and symbolic plane and in so doing, give meaning to meaninglessness. In our paper three short clinical cases are presented.