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[French : déjà, already + vu, seen.]
Déjà vu refers to a state wherein a person feels certain (cognitive judgment) that he or she has previously seen or experienced something that is actually being encountered for the first time. Sigmund Freud believed the feeling corresponded to the memory of an unconscious daydream.
The term first appeared in a French translation of the Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901b) as part of the discussion of the superstition that can be associated with this mysterious feeling. Freud quotes certain "psychologists," without specifying who they are. The concept falls squarely within the framework of the paramnesia extensively described by psychiatrists in France, primarily Wigan (1844) and Valentin Magnan (1893), who described systematic delirium accompanied by the illusion of doppelgängers, J. Capgras (1923), who described the illusion of doppelgangers, and Pierre Janet (1905), who described cases of false recognition.
Freud discusses the concept in terms of the psycho-pathology of everyday life (errors, slips) by removing it from the context of psychosis and by supporting it with his own self-analysis ("rapid sensations of déjà vu that I myself experienced"). He returned to it again, but within the context of therapy, in his "Fausse reconnaissance (déjà raconté) in Psycho-Analytic Treatment" (1914a), referring to a central example of the analysis of the Wolf Man. He then provided a partial summary of authors who had discussed the issue, separating them into "believers" (who thought that déjà vu was proof of a previous existence), among whom he includes Pythagoras, and "nonbelievers," who regard such events as false memories (Wigan, 1860). Freud himself assumes a different position (which he acknowledges sharing with Joseph Grasset, 1904) by believing in the reality of the representative content, but associating this with the reactivation of an older unconscious impression. He returned to the question again in terms of self-analysis at the end of his life in "A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis" (1936a).
Déjà vu is one of the "uncanny feelings" that, for Freud, play the role of hallucinations, which become more frequent and systematic during certain mental disturbances. This is the most convincing example of breaching the boundary between the normal and the pathological addressed by Freud. It involves a dissociative type of change experienced by the subject in his or her perception of things or himself. Reality appears distant, like a dream or a shadow, and it is at this point that false recognition occurs. Along with this displacement of the perceived object from the present into the past, there is a confused feeling of expectation or foreknowledge, whereby the subject is simultaneously projected into the future. For Freud this involves the replacement of some part of reality by a repressed desire (1901b). In the example cited here, a young girl replaces the perception of her wish to have seen her brother die with the sensation of having already experienced the situation (a trip to the countryside to visit some young girls whose brother is seriously ill). The topographic displacement (unconscious/conscious) is also spatio-temporal, for the memory involves the house and the girls' dresses but not the brother's illness. In "A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis," the same phenomenon is reversed since the reality of the Acropolis dissolves within the feeling of disbelief Freud experiences. Here, doubt replaces certainty; doubt is awakened by the reality of the perception but contaminates perception at the same time.
The concept of déjà vu must be compared with other analogous terms in analysis, such as déjà vécu (already experienced) and déjà raconté (already communicated). According to Freud, this paramnesia can be explained as a confusion between the intention to communicate and its realization. As with the doubt in his dream, these forms of paramnesia refer to specifically significant facts, such as the hallucination of the severed finger that the Wolf Man is convinced he has already told Freud about, when, in fact, he had only mentioned the existence of the small knife carried by his uncle. Generally speaking, paramnesia leads to a reflection on the process of remembering during therapy and on the patient's illusion of having "always known" the repressed content revealed by interpretation ("Remembering, Repeating, Working-through"). "It is by this means," Freud writes, "that the problem of analysis is resolved" (1914g).
Déjà vu touches on the whole question of forgetting as a dissociation of memory, as well as on the question of true and false from the psychoanalytic point of view. The false recognition of Norbert Harnold ("Is it a 'real' ghost?") is the true recognition of the originally invested object displaced within the context of archeology in Delusions and Dreams in Jensen's "Gradiva" (1907a [1906j]).
Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund. (1901b). The psychopathology of everyday life. SE,6.
——. (1907a [1906j]). Delusions and dreams in Jensen's "Gradiva." SE, 9: 1-95.
——. (1914a). Fausse reconnaissance ("déjà raconté") in psycho-analytic treatment. SE, 13: 199-207.
——. (1914g). Remembering, repeating, working-through (Further recommendations on the technique of psycho-analysis II). SE, 12: 147-156.
——. (1936a). A disturbance of memory on the Acropolis (an open letter to Romain Rolland on the occasion of his seventieth birthday). SE, 22, 239-248.
—SOPHIEDE MIJOLLA-MELLOR
A French term used by psychical researchers to characterize the feeling people sometimes have that some scene or experience in the present also occurred in the past. Déjà vu (already seen) is often coupled with déjà entendu (already heard). Through the years, many have related the feelings of déjà vu to the phenomenon of astral projection or out-of-the-body travel, when individuals apparently visit a distant place in an astral or etheric body during sleep. Déjà vu is also associated with fulfillment of a prior premonition of a forthcoming event.
More recently, déjà vu has been connected to experiences of reincarnation, when a feeling of prior knowledge is so strong that people feel sure it must have come from a former incarnation. In a celebrated case in India, a little girl named Shanti Devi, born in Delhi in 1926, claimed that she had lived elsewhere in a former birth, and even named the city. When taken there, she correctly identified the house, family, and other circumstantial details.
Feelings of déjà vu are rarely evidential or even reliable. Scenes in the present may only appear familiar because they contain some element connected with a past experience and re-activate the sensation of familiarity. Psychologists have characterized the phenomenon of false remembering as "postidentifying paramnesia."
Sources:
Berger, Arthur S., and Joyce Berger. The Encyclopedia of Parapsychology and Psychical Research. New York: Paragon House, 1991.
Déjà vu (IPA: English /deɪʒɑː vuː/, French /deʒa vy/) (French for "already seen", also called paramnesia from the Greek word para (παρα) for
parallel and mnēmē (μνήμη) for memory) is the experience of feeling that one has witnessed or experienced a new situation
previously. The term was coined by a French psychic researcher,
Émile Boirac (1851–1917) in his
book L'Avenir des sciences psychiques (The Future of Psychic Sciences), which expanded upon an essay he wrote while
an undergraduate. The experience of déjà vu is usually accompanied by a compelling sense of familiarity, and also a sense of
"eeriness", "strangeness", or "weirdness". The "previous" experience is most frequently attributed to a dream, although in some
cases there is a firm sense that the experience "genuinely happened" in the past. Déjà vu has been described as "remembering the
future." See spirit explanation below.
The experience of déjà vu seems to be very common; in formal studies 70% of people report having experienced it at least once. References to the experience of déjà vu are also found in literature of the past, indicating it is not a new phenomenon. It has been extremely difficult to invoke the déjà vu experience in laboratory settings, therefore making it a subject of few empirical studies. Recently, researchers have found ways to recreate this sensation using hypnosis.[1]
According to Arthur Funkhouser there are three major types of déjà vu.[2]
Usually translated as 'already lived,' déjà vécu is described in a quotation from Charles Dickens:
| “ | We have all some experience of a feeling, that comes over us occasionally, of what we are saying and doing having been said and done before, in a remote time – of our having been surrounded, dim ages ago, by the same faces, objects, and circumstances – of our knowing perfectly what will be said next, as if we suddenly remember it![3] | ” |
When most people speak of déjà vu, they are actually experiencing déjà vécu. Surveys have revealed that as much as 70% of the population have had these experiences, usually between ages 15 to 25, when the mind is still subjectable to noticing the change in environment.[4] The experience is usually related to a very ordinary event, but it is so striking that it is remembered for several years afterwards.
Déjà vécu refers to an experience involving more than just sight, which is why labeling such "déjà vu" is usually inaccurate. The sense involves a great amount of detail, sensing that everything is just as it was before and a weird knowledge of what is going to be said or happen next.
More recently, the term déjà vécu has been used to describe very intense and persistent feelings of a déjà vu type, which occur as part of a memory disorder.[5]
This phenomenon specifies something 'already felt.' Unlike the implied precognition of déjà vécu, déjà senti is primarily or even exclusively a mental happening, has no precognitive aspects, and rarely if ever remains in the afflicted person's memory afterwards.
Dr. John Hughlings Jackson recorded the words of one of his patients who suffered from temporal lobe or psychomotor epilepsy in an 1889 paper:
| “ | What is occupying the attention is what has occupied it before, and indeed has been familiar, but has been for a time forgotten, and now is recovered with a slight sense of satisfaction as if it had been sought for. ... At the same time, or ... more accurately in immediate sequence, I am dimly aware that the recollection is fictitious and my state abnormal. The recollection is always started by another person's voice, or by my own verbalized thought, or by what I am reading and mentally verbalize; and I think that during the abnormal state I generally verbalize some such phrase of simple recognition as 'Oh yes – I see', 'Of course – I remember', but a minute or two later I can recollect neither the words nor the verbalized thought which gave rise to the recollection. I only find strongly that they resemble what I have felt before under similar abnormal conditions. | ” |
As with Dr. Jackson's patient, some temporal-lobe epileptics may experience this phenomenon.
This experience is less common and involves an uncanny knowledge of a new place. The translation is "already visited." Here one may know his or her way around in a new town or landscape while at the same time knowing that this should not be possible.
Dreams, reincarnation and also out-of-body travel have been invoked to explain this phenomenon. Additionally, some suggest that reading a detailed account of a place can result in this feeling when the locale is later visited. Two famous examples of such a situation were described by Nathaniel Hawthorne in his book Our Old Home[6] and Sir Walter Scott in Guy Mannering.[7] Hawthorne recognized the ruins of a castle in England and later was able to trace the sensation to a piece written about the castle by Alexander Pope nearly a century earlier.
C. G. Jung published an account of déjà visité in his 1952 paper On synchronicity.[8]
In order to distinguish déjà visité from déjà vécu, it is important to identify the source of the feeling. Déjà vécu is in reference to the temporal occurrences and processes, while déjà visité has more to do with geography and spatial relations.
In recent years, déjà vu has been subjected to serious psychological and neurophysiological research. The most likely explanation of déjà vu is that it is not an act of "precognition" or "prophecy", but rather an anomaly of memory; it is the impression that an experience is "being recalled". [citation needed]See Chris Moulin's work. This explanation is substantiated by the fact that the sense of "recollection" at the time is strong in most cases, but that the circumstances of the "previous" experience (when, where and how the earlier experience occurred) are quite uncertain. Likewise, as time passes, subjects can exhibit a strong recollection of having the "unsettling" experience of déjà vu itself, but little to no recollection of the specifics of the event(s) or circumstance(s) they were "remembering" when they had the déjà vu experience. In particular, this may result from an overlap between the neurological systems responsible for short-term memory (events which are perceived as being in the present) and those responsible for long-term memory (events which are perceived as being in the past). In other words, the events would be stored into memory before the conscious part of the brain even receives the information and processes it. This would explain why one is, if it ever comes to mind, powerless trying to twist the outcome of the event in order to create a paradox. The delay is only of a few milliseconds, and besides, already happened at the time the conscious of the individual is experiencing it.
Another theory being explored is that of vision. As the theory suggests, one eye may record what is seen fractionally faster than the other, creating that "strong recollection" sensation upon the "same" scene being viewed milliseconds later by the opposite eye. However, this one fails to explain the phenomenon when other sensory inputs are involved, such as the auditive part, and especially the digital part. If one, for instance, experience déjà vu of someone slapping the fingers on his/her left hand, then the déjà vu feeling is certainly not due to his/her right hand to be late on the left one. Also, persons with only one eye still report experiencing deja vu or deja vecu. The global phenomenon must therefore be narrowed down to the brain itself (say, one hemisphere would be late compared to the other one).
Considerable strength is added to this interpretation by the fact that computers experience very similar effects when inputs are processed in an unexpected order. This is known as a race condition, and is often responsible for subtle bugs in complex systems.
A clinical correlation has been found between the experience of déjà vu and disorders such as schizophrenia and anxiety,[9] and the likelihood of the experience considerably increases with subjects having these conditions.
However, the strongest pathological association of déjà vu is with temporal lobe
epilepsy.[10][11] This correlation has led some researchers to speculate that the experience of
déjà vu is possibly a neurological anomaly related to improper electrical discharge in the
brain. As most people suffer a mild (i.e. non-pathological)
It has been reported that certain recreational drugs increase the chances of déjà vu occurring in the user. Some pharmaceutical drugs, when taken together, have also been implicated in the cause of déjà vu. Taiminen and Jääskeläinen (2001) reported the case of an otherwise healthy male who started experiencing intense and recurrent sensations of déjà vu on taking the drugs amantadine and phenylpropanolamine together to relieve flu symptoms. He found the experience so interesting that he completed the full course of his treatment and reported it to the psychologists to write-up as a case study. Due to the dopaminergic action of the drugs and previous findings from electrode stimulation of the brain (e.g. Bancaud, Brunet-Bourgin, Chauvel, & Halgren, 1994), Taiminen and Jääskeläinen speculate that déjà vu occurs as a result of hyperdopaminergic action in the mesial temporal areas of the brain.
The similarity between a déjà vu-eliciting stimulus and an existing, but different, memory trace may lead to the sensation. Thus, encountering something which evokes the implicit associations of an experience or sensation that cannot be remembered may lead to déjà vu. In an effort to experimentally reproduce the sensation, Banister and Zangwill (1941) used hypnosis to give participants posthypnotic amnesia suggestions for material they had already seen. When this was later re-encountered, the restricted activation caused by the posthypnotic amnesia resulted in three of the 10 participants reporting what the authors termed paramnesias. Memory-based explanations may lead to the development of a number of non-invasive experimental methods by which a long sought-after analogue of déjà vu can be reliably produced that would allow it to be tested under well-controlled experimental conditions.
In the late 20th and early 21st Centuries, it was widely believed that déjà vu could be caused by the mis-timing of neuronal firing. This timing error was thought to lead the brain to believe that it was encountering a stimulus for the second time, when in fact, it was simply re-experiencing the same event from a slightly delayed source. A number of variations of these theories exist, with miscommunication of the two cerebral hemispheres and abnormally fast neuronal firing also given as explanations for the sensation. Perhaps the most widely acknowledged neuronal theory is the optical pathway delay theory which explains déjà vu as being the product of a delayed optical input from one eye. Closely following the input from the first eye (when it should be simultaneous), this misleads conscious awareness and suggests a sensation of familiarity when there should not be one. Although intuitively plausible, this theory is untestable due to the minute times involved in neuronal firing, and inconsistent with reports that blind individuals experience déjà vu in the same way as sighted individuals (O'Connor & Moulin, 2006).
According to some, we are more than our physical body; we are body-mind-soul-spirit. The spirit part of us has the ability to be in more than one time and place. Sometimes the spirit part jumps ahead a couple of seconds. Information is passed back. When we encounter the same event in real time, the mind recognizes the event as having already been experienced. Déjà vu has been described as "remembering the future."
Déjà vu is associated with precognition, clairvoyance or extra-sensory perceptions, and it is frequently cited as evidence for "psychic" abilities in the general population. Non-scientific explanations attribute the experience to prophecy, visions (such as received in dreams) or past-life memories.
Some believe déjà vu is the memory of dreams. Though the majority of dreams are never remembered, a dreaming person can display activity in the areas of the brain that process long-term memory. It has been speculated that dreams read directly into long-term memory, bypassing short-term memory entirely. In this case, déjà vu might be a memory of a forgotten dream with elements in common with the current waking experience. This may be similar to another phenomenon known as déjà rêvé, or "already dreamed."
Not only is the link to dreams as they pertain to déjà vu the subject of scientific and psychological studies, it is also a subject of spiritual texts, as is found, for example, in the writings of the Bahá'í Faith with quotes like "... perchance when ten years are gone, thou wilt witness in the outer world the very things thou hast dreamed tonight."[12] and "Behold how the thing which thou hast seen in thy dream is, after a considerable lapse of time, fully realized."[13]
Those believing in reincarnation theorize that déjà vu is caused by fragments of past-life memories being jarred to the surface of the mind by familiar surroundings or people. Others theorize that the phenomenon is caused by astral projection, or out-of-body experiences (OBEs), where it is possible that individuals have visited places while in their astral bodies during sleep. The sensation may also be interpreted as connected to the fulfillment of a condition as seen or felt in a premonition. For further cases of remembering information from past lives, see Ian Stevenson.
It has been suggested in the theory of MWI that since parallel universes all branch from the same source, it is plausible that we are connected to our other selves living in alternate realities, the same person experiencing many different possibilities [14]. Déjà vu could therefore be a moment in which parallel universes overlap and we experience the happenings of an alternate universe a few milliseconds ahead of our own reality.
Jamais vu is a term in psychology (from the French, meaning "never seen") which is used to describe any familiar situation which is not recognized by the observer.
Often described as the opposite of déjà vu, jamais vu involves a sense of eeriness and the observer's impression of seeing the situation for the first time, despite rationally knowing that he or she has been in the situation before.
Jamais vu is more commonly explained as when a person momentarily does not recognize a word, person, or place that they already know.
Jamais vu is sometimes associated with certain types of amnesia and
Theoretically, as seen below, a jamais vu feeling in a sufferer of a delirious disorder or intoxication could result in a delirious explanation of it, such as in the
Times Online reports:
| “ | Chris Moulin, of the University of Leeds, asked 92 volunteers to write out "door" 30 times in 60 seconds. At the International Conference on Memory in Sydney last week he reported that 68 per cent of the volunteers showed symptoms of jamais vu, such as beginning to doubt that "door" was a real word. Dr Moulin believes that a similar brain fatigue underlies a phenomenon observed in some schizophrenia patients: that a familiar person has been replaced by an impostor. Dr Moulin suggests they could be suffering from chronic jamais vu. [1] | ” |
Presque vu (from French, meaning "almost seen") is the sensation of being on the brink of an epiphany. Often very disorienting and distracting, presque vu rarely leads to an actual breakthrough. Frequently, one experiencing presque vu will say that they have something "on the tip of their tongue."
Presque vu is often cited by people who suffer from
L'esprit de l'escalier (from French, "staircase wit") is remembering something when it is too late. For example, a clever come-back to a remark, thought of after the conversation has ended. Another example for this is when you're about to take a test and you know everything, but, when it begins, you forget all that you've learned; after taking the test you remember absolutely everything that you had forgotten while taking it.
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 | Dictionary. The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition Copyright © 2007, 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Updated in 2007. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved. Read more |
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| Psychoanalysis. International Dictionary of Psychoanalysis. Copyright © 2005 by The Gale Group, Inc. All rights reserved. Read more |
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| Occultism & Parapsychology Encyclopedia. Encyclopedia of Occultism and Parapsychology. Copyright © 2001 by The Gale Group, Inc. All rights reserved. Read more |
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