Hallucinations and related concepts—their conceptual background

Prior to the seventeenth century, the experiences we now name hallucinations were valued within a cultural context, they could bring meaning to the subject or the world. From mid-seventeenth to eighteenth centuries, they acquire a medical quality in mental and organic illnesses. However, the term was only fully integrated in psychiatry by Esquirol in the eighteenth-nineteenth centuries. By then, a controversy begins on whether hallucinations...