The next seminar in the Hearing the Voice Research Seminar series, featuring a presentation by Dr Sam Wilkinson on ‘Hearing identity: the (re)presentation of other agents in auditory verbal hallucinations’, will take place in the Birley Room at Hatfield College at Durham University (number 20 on this map) on Thursday 12 June 2014, 5 pm – 7 pm.
Abstract Current models of auditory verbal hallucinations (AVHs) tend to focus on the mechanisms underlying their occurrence, but often fail to address more fine-grained aspects of the content of the auditory experience. In other words, they tend to ask why there are AVHs at all, instead of asking why, given that there are AVHs, they have the properties that they have. One such property, which has been largely overlooked and which we will focus on here, is why the voices are often experienced as coming from (or being the voices of) agents, and often specific, individualised agents. In this paper, we argue not only that the representation of agents is important in accurately describing many cases of AVH, but also that deeper reflection on what is involved in the representation of agents has potentially vital consequences for our aetiological understanding of AVH, namely, for understanding how and why AVHs come about.
Anyone with an interest in Hearing the Voice research is welcome to attend. If you would like to reserve a place please contact Victoria Patton.