What Are the Clinical Implications of Protoconsciousness Theory for the Conceptualization of Those Psychiatric Disorders Commonly Referred to as Mental Illnesses?

J. Allan Hobson proposes that human high-order awareness, a type of meta-awareness, arose from a basic and low-order awareness (“protoconsciousness”) common to animals and humans that is primarily emotional and perceptual. Hobson also suggests that the latter is phenomenally fully expressed in the dreams of both animals and humans, whereas the former is only expressed in humans during wakefulness and is intimately related to the development of language. According to this theory, the awareness of one’s self and all related aspects of metacognition depend on the flowing of time and space related personal experiences which are stored in memory circuits after some mental elaboration mediated by linguistic abilities. In his model, the mutual relationships and influences between these two levels of human awareness must be physiologically regulated to avoid psy=chosis. In Hobson’s view, dreaming is akin to an organic psychosis (or Delirium), which is clinically distinct from the psychosis found in mental disorders such as schizophrenia or manic-depressive illness.