Voices as Concern, Interest, and Need for Being with The Other

Upon reading my friend TripTechnician's latest article, The Other, I agree with one of the main messages of it that hearing voices can be precipitated by, and lead to, external awareness, care, and concern for, or from, the other, or others. This is a much neglected area or perspective of understanding hearing voices, as is the area of hearing voices that is related to educational learning.

This article makes two points - firstly that hearing voices can be an experience that reflects relatedness to others, and secondly that voices can, and often are, more experienced than heard (perhaps since they appear to a meaning sensing part of the mind rather than a sense data interpreting bit).

I've entitled this article first as voices, because hearing and voices are about two completely separate things, as concepts and areas of perceptual and cognitive experience and understanding. A voice, as Luke points out, can be something initially felt or seen in the environment, and therefore not merely something internal or heard. It is a feeling and a whole
experience.

Hearing voices are often referred and regarded by professionals as something inward looking, internal, imaginary, and introspective, but it may be something such as a concern and willingness to be with others, or the desire for others to reciprocate upon that desire for sociality or for knowledge. This would surely then be an interest in the outside or external, in the
social and interpersonal, and in terms of a unification of self with others, a spiritual as well as a social concept, perception, and interaction.

It is these areas of understanding, motivation, and perception which are absent from any medical psychiatric view of hearing voices, which associates it with passivity and thought disorder, but it is the areas of psychological understanding and study which are of most interest to me, concerning the origins and the transformations and experience of hearing voices.
The term hearing voices is problematic for me, because I think it's a compound term and an oxymoron, and one which is really describing two completely different things - hearing on the one hand, and voices on the other. Voices are more experienced than imagined and heard.

Peter H. Donnelly

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The Other

I sit down and prepare to continue writing my novel. A multitude of images and ideas presents itself to me. I look at the portrait of DH Lawrence on the cover of the paperback on the table, he speaks to me: "What are you going to make with the ideas - that's the question ?" he says. His comment is helpful. An external force has helped with my internal thinking - strange to some but commonplace to me since I suffer from intrusive, ever present voices in my mind. Since I have always tried to continue my explorations and literary calling despite my illness I have had
to adapt to this my mental peculiarity. In short I am still able to think about things, but now some of the thoughts seem to be external to my mind, taking the form of voices or telepathic messages from people.

I wonder about this state - will it train my mind to be ever focussed outwards? Will the realities and lives of other people be easier for me to relate to, since even in my innermost moments I feel I am conversing with another, my attention directed towards the other? I cannot say, although I have met other people who suffer from schizophrenia who have concluded that
something about their mental sufferings has enabled them to become a better person, more sensitive to others. Certain kinds of inner psychic friction may truly lead in this wholesome direction. Good luck to anyone who would like to explore it.

Unfortunately there may be a bad side too: I sometimes get very bitter and angry towards these "others" in my mind, I hope that will not result in resentment or unpleasantness, but sometimes i probably can get moody and a little bitter. Maybe the good cancels the bad, but I will still have to live with this morphing of my character into new forms that my illness has
brought about. At least I can share the experience with others in the hearing voices group whose lives are similar in these ways.