A patient reports smelling her late mother's distinctive perfume, briefly and vividly, while looking through an old photo album, and immediately recognises this as a memory triggered by the photographs rather than a present, real smell. Before revealing the answer: is this an olfactory hallucination?
No. This is better understood as a vivid olfactory memory triggered by an emotionally significant context (the photographs), which the phenomenon's own text explicitly distinguishes from a true olfactory hallucination — the key difference being that she recognises this as recollection prompted by the photos, not as a present-moment perception with no explanation.
References
- Casey, P. & Kelly, B. (2019). Fish's Clinical Psychopathology, 4th ed. Ch. 3, 'Disorders of Perception'.