Making Sense of Voices
Marius Romme, Sandra Escher, and Dirk Corstens interviewed by Brendan Leahy, in Marcel Kuijsten (ed.), Conversations on Consciousness and the Bicameral Mind (Julian Jaynes Society, 2022).
Summary: Marius Romme, Sandra Escher, and Dirk Corstens interviewed by Brendan Leahy on their research into hearing voices as well as effective strategies for coping with hearing voices.
Excerpt: Brendan Leahy: Can you please start by introducing yourselves?
Marius Romme: I’m a psychiatrist — now not as active anymore because I’m retired, but I’ve worked in psychiatry for 60 years. I’ve been critical of mainstream psychiatry, because in my view they make human problems into symptoms of illness, including psychotic symptoms.
Sandra Escher: I actually was trained as a journalist and then Marius invited me to help him with the Hearing Voices Project, back in the very beginning, when his patient, Patsy Hage, who was 30 years old at the time, challenged him to expand his thinking regarding her experience of hearing voices. She had read Julian Jaynes’s book, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, and Jaynes’s theory provided her with a historical context for understanding her voices. Then over time I became more and more involved. I think one of my advantages is that I don’t see “diagnoses,” I hear the experiences of people. We developed an interview process, and I’ve interviewed over 300 voice hearers. We’ve been working together since 1987. …