Orientational Perception

Abstract

Introduction Observations from a variety of sources, such as gas inhalation therapy,¹⁹ investigations of childhood autism and of adult schizophrenias,^15,18 of body imagery,¹⁷ the literature of psychotomimetic drugs, and every day experience with the psychiatric patient, seemed to have converged and impressed on us the importance of changes in orientational perception. Once the ear was attuned to the possibilities of subtle subjective distortions in these percepts, it seemed that every psychiatric patient encountered by one of us (D.C.) made a direct or oblique reference to experiencing them. The following are condensed excerpts from a consecutive series of 14 ambulatory patients with minor psychiatric illness, all of whom made spontaneous references to such distortions: No. 1: Often, when lying on a couch, a feeling of "floating, weightlessness, spinning, sinking or expanding into space; the objects around moving fast." No. 2: On waking, a feeling