This article discusses some potential difficulties arising from psychoanalytic theory and tradition that may hinder psychodynamic psychotherapists' exploration and discussion of benign auditory and visual hallucinations (AVH) with their patients and the mental health community. Reports of AVH are relatively common in nonpsychiatric populations. Varied theoretical approaches to psychosis, psychoanalysis' positivist tradition against its clinical emphasis on patient subject experience, and the seemingly magical and unquantifiable techniques used in psychodynamic therapy to make meaning of hallucinations are speculated to contribute to how therapists attend to these phenomena in treatment and research.
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