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This paper presents perceptual disturbances which I call 'blank hallucinations'. Their occurrence is by no means infrequent, although often overlooked. My own case material over the last fifteen years in analysis and in supervision includes ten.
Blank hallucinations are stereotyped sensory perceptions without appropriate external stimuli. Lacking any content related to persons, objects, or events, they are close to elementary hallucinations as which we designate such unformed perceptions as sparks, lightning streaks, cloudlike phenomena, etc. They differ in intensity, frequency, and duration, ranging from formes frustes like hazy blurring of perception, to full hallucinations.1 They may last a few seconds, or minutes, hours, or months. Making their first appearance most often in childhood around the oedipal phase, they recur during the individual's lifetime (i) in situations of stress or frustration, (ii) in emotional states like anxiety and rage, (iii) before falling asleep and during sleep, and (iv) under special conditions as, e.g., fever, daydreaming, or the analytical situation. When awake, the patient is usually aware of the hallucinatory character of the phenomena (pseudo-hallucinations).
It was Isakower who in 1938 (24) first described a specific group of blank hallucinations, namely those occurring when falling asleep. He saw in them reminiscences of the infant's falling asleep when satisfied at the mother's breast. This concept has been very extensively applied in analytic literature. Recently, similar phenomena have been the object of research in a number of publications: Deutsch (10), Lewy (29), Murphy (33), etc. My investigation based on my own cases has led me to different conclusions about the phenomenological aspect, the meaning, and the type of individuals afflicted. In a previous publication, I explained the phenomena as attempts at reparative repetition of infantile pavor nocturnus attacks in which the reactivation of oral shock experie