Abstracts concerning déjà experiences associated with psychoanalytic thinking
The abstracts are listed in reverse chronological order: the more recent ones are listed first.
In the older literature, there were other terms used for déjà vu: paramnesia, fausse reconnaissance (French), Erinnerungsfälschung or -täuschung (German) and so on. You'll encounter these if you scroll down to the early abstracts (i.e., before 1910 or so).
For those that were published without an abstract (or for which we could not locate one) we have tried to provide some information from the paper or book. We are sure we have not done justice to many of them and would be grateful for suggestions for amendment or correction. There are still many that we have not been able to find abstracts for or make comments on.
To find an author, year, or a specific word, perform a search using CTRL-F.
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The ego, the ocular, and the uncanny: why are metaphors of vision central in accounts of the uncanny?
Rahimi S.
University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, S7N 5B1, Canada. Sadeq.Rahimi at usask.ca
International Journal Psychoanalysis 94(3): 453-76, 2013
doi: 10.1111/j.1745-8315.2012.00660.x. Epub 2013 Mar 15
Abstract
I am my own twin, Always with me, same as me, and always watching me! From interview with a psychotic patient Every man carries with him through life a mirror, as unique and impossible to get rid of as his shadow W.H. Auden, 1989, p.93 I cannot urge you too strongly to a meditation on optics. Jacques Lacan, 1991, p.76 This paper outlines the basic arguments for a reading of the notion of the uncanny that draws on direct and metaphorical significances of the ocular in the development of human ego. It is argued that a specular-oriented reading of the uncanny as made possible through Lacan's model for ego development introduces a significant analytic device capable of explaining diverse features of the uncanny experience that escaped the traditional phallic/castration-based reading. To examine this claim, evidence is presented from a number of contexts to demonstrate how uncanny experiences are typically constructed through and associated with themes and metaphors of vision, blindness, mirrors and other optical tropes. Evidence is also presented from a historical point of view to demonstrate the strong presence of ocular and specular themes, devices and associations in a tradition of literary and psychological writing out of which the notion of 'the uncanny' (including Freud's own formulation) emerged. It is demonstrated that the main instances of the uncanny, such as doppelgangers, ghosts, déjà vu, alter egos, self-alienations and split personhoods, phantoms, twins, living dolls and many more in the list of 'things of terror' typically share two important features: they are closely tied with visual tropes, and they are variations on the theme of doubling. It is then argued that both of these features are integrally associated with the developmental processes of ego formation and self-identity, thus explaining the strong association of the uncanny accounts and experiences with ocular and specular motifs and metaphors.
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[Proust e Freud: Memoria involuntaria e o estranhamente familiar]
[Proust and Freud: Involuntary memory and the strangely familiar] [in Portuguese]
Moritz-Kon, N
Percurso: Revista de Psicanalise 10(20)[1]: 37-48, 1998
Abstract
Attempts to define the similarities and differences between what the author feels are 2 analogous experiences: Freud's description of the "strangely familiar" ("das Unheimliche") in his paper, "The uncanny" (1919) and Marcel Proust's definition of "involuntary memory" in 2 moments of his 7 vol. novel, "Remembrances of things past" (1913-1927). Proust's "involuntary recollection" is triggered by a physical sensation (e.g., the taste of a "madeleine," a small, sweet, tea-dipped cake). Freud's "uncanny" is the impression of having already experienced a moment or situation ("deja vu). The main difference between Proust's and Freud's experiences is the sense of joy and liberation associated with Proust's involuntary recollection, whereas Freud's "uncanny" triggers unease and anxiety.
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Screen reconstructions: traumatic memory, conviction, and the problem of verification
Good MI
Harvard Medical School, USA
Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 46(1): 149-83, 1998
Abstract
Just as formerly recalled screen memories may be remembered again in the course of psychoanalysis, so new screen phenomena can arise during the treatment process. This paper attempts to relate the process of reconstruction and the occurrence of a type of screening. It is proposed that, under certain circumstances, psychoanalysis can result in a mutually determined screen construction that both patient and analyst consider convincing and valid but which may, for the most part, actually be untrue as a result of the screen function. Screen memories arising during the reconstructive process resemble the déjà vu and déjà raconté situation in that the experience is felt with certainty to have actually occurred previously, although a degree of doubt about its having happened can consciously or unconsciously coincide. Factors contributing to the formation of screen constructions include regressive aspects of the analytic situation; superego elements and the experience of an injunction to remember; the wish to witness what took place in the past; direct or indirect suggestive influence by the analyst; a defensive identification with the analyst; and the analyst's theoretical orientation to reconstruction. Like a screen memory having some veridical content yet serving a masking function, a screen construction can have elements of truth. At the same time such constructions may function as a strong resistance of compromise against intense erotic, sadomasochistic, or narcissistic themes in the transference/counter-transference that were painful or conflictual in the past. If screen constructions are assumed to be historically real or valid, they may not be analyzed for their transferential screening role. A previously published case involving a presumably repressed memory of sexual molestation is considered from the perspective of the possible development of a screen reconstruction. Clinical and scientific aspects of seeking extra-analytic confirmation or falsification of reconstructions are discussed.
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Remembering the personal past: Descriptions of autobiographical memory
Ross BM
New York, NY, USA: Oxford University Press 1991
Abstract
In this resonant, scholarly work, Bruce Ross presents an encompassing theoretical framework and overview of autobiographical memory. Drawing on a wide range of ideas from academic psychology, the social sciences, psychoanalysis, and the humanistic disciplines, the author presents a stimulating and original perspective on this increasingly important topic.
Ross's description encompasses the full range of subjective responsiveness to personal memories, both with and without awareness, including real-world social context and examples that can be compared with one's own experience; critical assessment of psychoanalytic memory concepts with a clear distinction drawn between Freud's ideas and those of his later followers; childhood memories dealt with from dual standpoints of initial origin and adult retrospection; explanations of problems and dilemmas in philosophy and the human sciences that determine both what is to be counted as a memory experience and how memories can be validated; and the phenomena of individual memories compared with characteristics of group-determined memories and socially structured memories that persist across generations.
Students and researchers from a number of disciplines concerned with the psychology of memory, cognition, and identity will find this volume both insightful and thought-provoking.
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Multiple realities in clinical practice
Kafka JS
New Haven, CT, USA: Yale University Press 1989
Abstract
In this book, psychoanalyst John Kafka shows how the analyst can conceptualize a patient's psychic world to best accommodate and facilitate expanding self-discoveries and therapeutic growth. Dr. Kafka does not believe that the mind simply mirrors, more or less accurately, a fixed reality. Rather, he thinks that our personally meaningful realities are fluctuating and subtly diverging. . . . To understand the patient's inner reality, he says, the analyst must adopt an approach that tolerates and encompasses individual evolving reality structures differing in terms of time and space, organismic size (distinguishing individual from family or group), and animate-inanimate discrimination.
Interweaving theory and illustrative case material, Dr. Kafka discusses the multiple-reality approach as it applies to many areas of interest to clinicians and researchers, from psychoanalysts to neuroscientists. These include issues of diagnosis and treatment, perception, thought and object formation, family dynamics, the patient's orientation in time, schizophrenia and the dreams of schizophrenics, synesthesia, and the effects of psychedelic drugs.
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Psychoanalysis and time
Arlow JA
Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 34(3): 507-28, 1986
Abstract
Psychoanalysis is fundamentally related to time because it is an effort to understand how disturbances in the present are determined by events in the past. Technically, we know that the patient who is reporting immediate perceptions is not aware of the passage of time, but he becomes self-conscious as undesirable elements threaten to appear in his associations. Time is not sensed by direct awareness, nor is it an agent of action or events. Various functions of the ego influence how time is experienced consciously, leading to phenomena such as déjà vu, a sensation of timelessness, misjudgment of time duration, the experience of premonition. Psychoanalysis more than any other discipline sheds light on the coexistence of past, present, and future, as influenced by unconscious fantasy thinking. The analyst's understanding of the patient's associations is guided by temporal factors such as context and contiguity, succession of similar or opposite elements. Basically, the self is a time-bound concept; identity implies that a self is the same entity at different points in time. There is a deep-seated rebellion against the tyranny of time, beginning with need frustration in the infant and culminating in the knowledge that man is destined to lose the struggle against death.
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Nostalgia
Sohn L
International Journal of Psychoanalysis 64(pt. 2): 203-11, 1983
("The déjà vu is to be considered as a paramnesia, with the feeling that one has seen it before, heard it before, or been it before, but does not know where or when. The basis for this may be in some real experience which has been forgotten, something real and not clearly recollected, or real, or fantasy life, waking or dream life." p. 204)
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Enuresis: A functional equivalent of a fetish
Calef V, Weinshel EM, Renik O, Mayer EL
International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 61: 295-305, 1980
Summary
The split in the ego between consciousness and unconsciousness which sometimes eventuates in fetishism can also be clinically manifested in sleep disturbances, depersonalization, déjà vuand a variety of alterations in the sense of reality. It is suggested that this same split comprises the central dynamic mechanism in enuresis. The sleep disturbance which accompanies enuresis involves a confusion between waking and sleeping, sometimes taking the form of a dream that one is awake.
Three patients (adult males) revealed in the course of their analyses that they suffered from childhood enuresis accompanied by a sleep disturbance. Milder forms of sleep disturbances persisted into adult life. In these analyses, certain perceptual distortions, difficulties in the sense of reality, confusions between fantasy and reality and between waking and sleeping, could all be linked to the functional split between consciousness and unconsciousness and eventually to disavowal of the female genitals. The enuresis represented a functional equivalent of the fetish (and it may be that the urinary stream itself actually served as fetish).
Psychological test data from nine enuretic boys were examined as well. This material clearly demonstrated that these boys wished to deny the differences between males and females, that they suffered from sleep disturbances and that they confused reality and fantasy, sleeping and waking. The combined data suggest the existence of a functional split in the ego used in the service of defense, the product of a regressive fixation and a reinstatement of an archaic mode of thought.
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Micropsia and testicular retractions
Myers WA
Psychoanalytic Quarterly 46(4): 580-604, 1977
Abstract
Describes the analysis of an adult male who experienced 5 episodes of micropsia which were precipitated by oedipal masturbatory fantasies. Traumatic visual events and testicular retractions during the oedipal and latency years predisposed the ego functions concerned with visual perception to later involvement in conflict. The micropsia itself is seen as defending against castration anxiety by means of a series of unconscious fantasies of denial. These fantasies cause a regression to an earlier mode of visual perception (and to micropsia) characteristic of latency. The defensive modifications of the functions of the ego itself seen in micropsia are closely allied to those seen in the déjà vu experience and in depersonalization.
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Early ego development and the déjá vu
Pacella BL
Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 23(2): 300-26, 1975
Summary
It is proposed that certain deja vu experiences may be the result of a sudden partial decathexis of the current situation, and a concomitant recathexis of primitive experiences which readily allow certain symbolic representations to force themselves into conscious awareness as a discrete and circumscribed experience in the perceptual ego, carrying with it only a strong sense of the familiar rather than discrete memories. The drive investment that cathects the current situation or object to be "familiarized" (deja vu) may be derived in substantial part from the "face-gestalt configuration" of the symbiotic and, later, nonsymbiotic mother, described as an early crucial organizer of the psyche.
Certain deja vu experiences may be initiated by anxiety (often castration anxiety) induced by the current reality situation. They could but not necessarily be dynamically similar or related structurally to other deja phenomena. It is speculated that there may be certain dynamic parallels between the deja vu) the dream screen of Lewin, and the Isakower phenomenon.
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Time and affect in psychopathology
Hartocollis P
Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 23(2): 383-395, 1975
Abstract
Discusses the sense of time, which is normally implicit and unconscious. In schizophrenia and borderline conditions, however, and in normal people under stress, the sense of time becomes dominant. The less one is conscious of time as a duration or perspective, the more likely that one is free of psychopathology. The exaggerated awareness of time may be experienced as an affectless state. Several types of time distortion are illustrated by clinical cases. Schizophrenia or borderline conditions are characterized by boredom and depersonalization affects dominated by the sense of time as present. Psychotic depression and morbid anxiety are dominated by the sense of an irrevocal past and a dreadful future, respectively. Time distortions reflect defenses against unconscious fantasies. Depending on the effectiveness of the blocking defense, time distortions may be experienced as pleasant or as painful. (29 refs.)
(Déjà vu referred to on pp. 387, 389.)
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Kapitel IX: Die Abwehrmechanismen, Die pathogene Abwehr, Die Verleugnung
[Chapter IX: The defense mechanisms, the pathogenic defense, the denial] [in German]
Fenichel O
Psychoanalytische Neurosenlehre, Olten: Walter Verlag, 1974
(See pp. 208-9.)
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Derealization and déjà vu: formal mechanisms
Siomopoulos V
American Journal of Psychotherapy 26(1): 84-9, 1972
SUMMARY
This paper suggests the possibility that perceptual wholes might be capable of forming larger object-affect wholes with the affective states associated with them. The phenomena of derealization and déjà vu appear to be reflections of disturbances in the organization of perceptual wholes and their affective components into such larger object-affect wholes. In derealization, a familiar affect is missing from a familiar object-affect whole. This is due to repression of pure affect viewed not as cathexis of an idea, but as a separate psychic structure. In déjà vu, the feeling of object familiarity is actually an awareness of a familiar affect constituting part of an object-affect whole. The phenomena of derealization and déjà vu appear to support the view that the affects are independent psychic structures following their own formal laws.
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Freud's déjà vu on the Acropolis. A symbolic relic of 'mater nuda'
Slochower H
The Psychoanalytic Quarterly 39(1): 90-102, 1970
Summary
The voyeuristic imagery which Freud uses in describing his feelings on the Acropolis is interpreted as a deja vu, connected with a childhood memory of having seen his mother nude. The Letter is further seen as another indication of Freud's greater attention, especially in the last years of his life, to the preoedipal phase. This is also evident in his increasing examination of the prehistory and myth of Egypt, Greece, and other places. To some degree, the oedipal and patriarchal considerations are also introduced in the Letter. Thus Freud's disturbance of memory may also be connected with having forgotten that it was FIiess who brought to his attention the idea of bisexuality.
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Unconscious fantasy and disturbances of conscious experience
Arlow JA
The Psychoanalytic Quarterly 38: 1-27, 1969
(He wrote about an "attack" of déjà vu and provides an example which he discusses.)
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Varieties of consciousness: I. Intercorrelations
Buck LA, Geers MB
Journal of Clinical Psychology 22: 151-2, 1966-7
Summary
The present study evaluated the interrelationships between the reported frequency of occurrence of the daydream, synesthesia, déjà vu, depersonalization, hypnagogic experience and the dream. Significant correlations were found in 33 of 55 comparisons.
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Time of dreaming and the déjà vu
Zuger B
Department of Psychiatry and Neurology, New York University School of Medicine, New York, N. Y., USA
Comprehensive Psychiatry 7(3): 191-6, 1966
Summary
Some dreams are presented which in content seem closely related in the immediate situation facing the dreamer at the time of recalling the dream. The question is raised if the sense of pastness of such dreams is not like that of the déjà vu. An attempt is made to correlate the occurrence of dreaming and the déjà vuphenomenon in 58 patients seen in psychotherapy. All 10 who reported as not dreaming also reported as not having experienced the déjà vu; dreaming generally correlated with experiencing the déjà vu. These findings are discussed from the point of view that dreaming may also be a product of the awakening or awake state. pp. 195-6
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A reconsideration of Freud's "A disturbance of memory on the Acropolis" in relation to identity disturbance
Harrison IB
Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 14(3): 518-527, 1966
("Depersonalization, like déjà vu, is a symptom revealing more or less successful defense during a period of erupting drive energies." [p. 525])
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Dreams and deja vu
Schneck JM
Psychosomatics 5: 116-8, 1964
SUMMARY
Déjà vu occurring within a dream, which so far as I know has not been mentioned before, is described now and compared with other material reported on this subject. The influences apparently brought to bear on its occurrence in this patient are discussed. It is said at times that déjà vu reflects an unconscious impression entering consciousness because of the presence of a current similar impression. Here the earlier impression was an event of which the patient was consciously aware, but with a symbolic significance of which the patient was apparently unaware. Déjà vu as been mentioned as having connections with unconscious fantasies and recent or distant dreams. The reverse occurred in the present case with the déjà vu occurring within the dream itself, linked to an earlier real life situation. The dream déjà vu in the present patient reflects his desire to have a second chance at success in reaching a goal. This conforms to an opinion given by another writer regarding the role of second chance. Previous cases I have reported do not, however, support this explanation. I expressed the opinion that there is an undesirable tendency to offer encompassing explanations of déjà vu in an attempt to fit a mold, whereas it would be better to recognize variations in psychodynamics present in different patients. This opinion is reenforced now along with support for my claim that déjà vu reflects ambivalence associated with recognizing an area of conflict that lies at the core of the phenomenon.
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The psychodynamics of 'deja vu'
Schneck JM
Psychoanalysis and the Psychoanalytic Review 49(4): 48-54, 1962
(This paper is essentially the same as Schneck, 1961 [see following paper]. On p. 51, though, the author wrote "Many déjà vu episodes take place without evidence of concurrent physical illness or physiological disturbance.")
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A contribution to the analysis of deja vu
Schneck JM
Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease 132: 91-3, 1961
("I wonder whether it would be more correct to say that déjà vu reflects only in part an attempt at acceptance, but more accurately the ambivalence associated with recognizing an area of conflict that lies at the core of the phenomenon." p. 91)
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Das déjà vu-Erlebnis
[The deja vu experience] [in German]
Herrmann T.
Psyche (Stuttg) 14: 60-76, 1960-1
("Das déjà vu ist ein durch Unbehaglichkeits- und Spannungsqualitäten ausgezeichnetes, im Zustand reduzierter Wachheit plötzlich auftretendes relativ kurz daurendes Erlebnis, bei dem irgendeine objektiv neue und auch gleichzeitig oder fast gleichzeitig als neu erkannte Umweltkonstellation, die wahrscheinlich für den Betroffenen nicht in spezifischer Weise bedeutsam zu sein braucht, unmittelbar bekannt und mit einer vermeintlich schon einmal dagewesenen identisch anmutet." p. 65).
[Déjà vu is an experience distinguished by qualities of unease and tension, arising suddenly in conditions of reduced alertness, and lasting a relatively short time, in which some objectively new and also simultaneously, or almost simultaneously, as a new constellation of surroundings that probably for the person involved do not need to be especially important, are immediately familiar and seem to be identical with what one holds to have been already.]
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Answer to Job
Jung CG
In: The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, vol. 11, Bolligen Series XX, Princeton University Press, Princeton, N. J., 1958.
("As always when an external event touches on some unconscious knowledge, this knowledge can reach consciousness. The event is recognized as a déjà vu, and one remembers a pre-existent knowledge about it." par. 640)
[The German version was originally published in 1952.]
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The meaning of déjà vu
Marcovitz E
The Psychoanalytic Quarterly 21(4): 481-9, 1952
(This is a good review of psychoanalytic thinking about déjà vu. He believes déjà vu, at least for some people, represents a second chance. p. 483)
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Ein "prophetischer" Traum
[A "prophetic" dream] [in German]
Zulliger B
Psyche 5: 232-236, 1951-2
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La Gnose et le temps
[Gnosis and Time] [in French]
Puech H-C
Zürich: Eranos Jahrbuch 20, 1951
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Déjà vu in Proust and Tolstoy
Pickford RW
International Journal of Psychoanalysis 25: 155-165, 1944
(As a Freudian psychoanalyst the author analyzes both examples of déjà vu in terms of repressed infantile and sexual needs. Tolstoy's description of a déjà vu experience is found in chapter XXV of the section entitled 'Youth' of his semi-autobiographical work, Childhood, Boyhood and Youth. The chapter is entitled 'I Get Acquainted'.
Poust's "déjà vu experience is recounted on pp. 20-24 of the fourth volume of the English translation of À la recherche du temps perdu." p. 160)
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Rossetti's 'Sudden Light' as an experience of déjà vu
Pickford RW
Glasgow University
British Journal of Medical Psychology 19: 192-200, 1941-3
(Rossetti's "déjà vu experience is to be understood as a momentary eruption into consciousness of unconscious identification of mistress with mother image, and, since this meaning could be tolerated in consciousness, the eruption was immediately wrapped in rationalizations and became converted into a poem." p. 199)
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Erroneous recognition (fausse reconnaisance)
Oberndorf CP
Psychiatric Quarterly 15(2): 316-26, 1941
Abstract
The feeling of déjà vu or of having said something before is primarily a disturbance of reality perception, and constitutes a defense reaction against future danger or unpleasantness, as well as against the anxiety associated with the memory of an undefined, unsolved experience (Freud's "wish for improvement of the situation").
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Three related experiences of déjà vu
Pickford RW
Character and Personality 9: 152-9, 1940
("Experiences of déjà vu, or 'false' recognition, are common among normal as well as abnormal people, and do not of themselves indicate abnormality of personality any more than do ordinary dreams. p. 152
"There is ... the distress at the fear of losing control of one's thoughts when something disturbing unconscious idea enters consciousness, and the déjà vu is a form of insistence that the experience is familiar, which protects surface layers of the personality to some extent from the disturbing effects of a direct uprush of unconscious material." p. 158)
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Brief an Romain Rolland (Eine Erinnerungsstörung auf der Acropolis)
[A letter to Romain Rolland (A disturbance of memory on the Acropolis)] [in German]
Freud S
Almanach 1937, pp. 9-21
(In the English version entitled "A disturbance of memory on the Acropolis", he refers to déjà vu on the 7th page.)
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A disturbance of memory on the Acropolis
Freud S
Standard Edition 22, London: Hogarth Press, 1936 / 1964
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Zur Metapsychologie des "déjà vu"
[Concerning the metapsychology of déjà vu] [in German]
Pötzl O
Imago (Vienna) 12: 393-402, 1926
(Due to his own experience the author agrees with Grasset that some instances of déjà vu arise from forgotten dreams [pp. 393-4]. Further on he wrote that those coming for therapy often experience déjà raconté [already told] and that a therapist, like himself, often experiences déjà vu, déjà entendu [already known], déjà éprouvé[already attempted], and déjà senti [already felt] [p. 395].)
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Les Obsessions et la Psychasthénie
[Obsessions and psychoasthenia] [Articles in French]
Janet P
Vol. 1, Libraire Felix Alcan, Paris, 1919,
(The sensation of déjà vu is an intellectual feeling that belongs to the area of depersonalization [p. 29].
It is discussed in these passages [pp. 295-8, 324-325, 558].)
(See http://archive.org/stream/lesobsessionsetl001jane#page/556/mode/2up )
Vol. 2, Libraire Felix Alcan, Paris, 1919,
(He discusses a case in which the patient was not familiar with places she should have known well. He says this is the opposite of déjà vu [now it might be called jamais vu - never seen]. p. 29)
(See http://openlibrary.org/books/OL24485564M/Les_obsessions_et_la_psychasth%C3%A9nie )
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The psychopathology of everyday life
Jones E
American Journal of Psychology 22(4): 477-527, 1911
(The author mentions Freud's explanation of déjà vu. p. 506)
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Determinism -- Chance -- and Superstitious Beliefs
Freud S (1901)
Chapter 12 in: Psychopathology of Everyday Life, Translation by A. A. Brill (1914), London: T. Fischer Unwin, 1922
"I do not know whether this phenomenon of Déjà vu was ever seriously offered as a proof of a former psychic existence of the individual; but it is certain that psychologists have taken an interest in it, and have attempted to solve the riddle in a multitude of speculative ways. None of the proposed tentative explanations seems right to me, because none takes account of anything but the accompanying manifestations and the favouring conditions of the phenomenon. Those psychic processes which, according to my observation, are alone responsible for the explanation of the Déjà vu -- namely, the unconscious fantasies -- are generally neglected by the psychologists even to-day.
"I believe that it is wrong to designate the feeling of having experienced something before as an illusion. On the contrary, in such moments something is really touched that we have already experienced, only we cannot consciously recall the latter because it never was conscious. In short, the feeling Déjà vu corresponds to the memory of an unconscious fantasy. There are unconscious fantasies (or day dreams) just as there are similar conscious creations, which everyone knows from personal experience.
"I realize that the object is worthy of most minute study, but I will here give the analysis of only one case of Déjà vu in which the feeling was characterized by particular intensity and persistence. A woman of thirty-seven years asserted that she most distinctly remembered that at the age of twelve and a half she paid her first visit to some school friends in the country, and as she entered the garden she immediately had the feeling of having been there before. This feeling was repeated as she went through the living-rooms, so that she believed she knew beforehand how big the next room was, what views one could have on looking out of it, etc. But the belief that this feeling of recognition might have its source in a previous visit to the house and garden, perhaps a visit paid in earliest childhood, was absolutely excluded and disproved by statements from her parents. The woman who related this sought no psychologic explanation, but saw in the appearance of this feeling a prophetic reference to the importance which these friends later assumed in her emotional life. On taking into consideration, however, the circumstance under which this phenomenon presented itself to her, we found the way to another conception." [pp. 320-1]
"My own experience of Déjà vu I can trace in a similar manner to the emotional constellation of the moment. It may he expressed as follows: 'That would be another occasion for awakening certain fantasies (unconscious and unknown) which were formed in me at one time or another as a wish to improve my situation.'"[13] [pp. 323-4]
[13] Thus far this explanation of Déjà vu has been appreciated by only one observer. Dr. Ferenczi, to whom the third edition of this is book is indebted for so many contributions, writes to me concerning this:"I have been convinced, through myself as well as others, that the inexplicable feeling of familiarity can be referred to unconscious fantasies of which we are unconsciously reminded in an actual situation. With one of my patients the process was apparently different but in reality it was quite analogous. This feeling returned to him very often, but showed itself regularly as originating in a forgotten (repressed) portion of a dream of the preceding night. Thus it appears that the Déjà vu can originate not only from day dreams but also from night dreams." [p. 324]
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Some further typical dreams
Freud S (1900)
Section E in: The Interpretation of Dreams, Basic Books, 2010, p. 409
("In some dreams of landscapes or other localities emphasis is laid in the dream itself on a convinced feeling of having been there once before. (Occurrences of ‘déjà vu’ in dreams have a special meaning."1)
1 [This last sentence was interpolated in 1914 (Die Traumdeutung, 4. Ausgabe, Leipzig and Vienna: Franz Deuticke.) The phenomenon of ‘déjà vu’ in general is discussed by Freud in Chapter XII (D) of his Psychopathology of Every-day Life (1901b) and in another short paper (Freud, 1914a ).
(1901b) Zur Psychopathologie des Alltagslebens, Berlin. [Trans.: The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, Standard Ed., 6.]
(1914a ) ‘Über fausse reconnaissance (“déjà raconté”) während der psychoanalytischen Arbeit’, [Trans.: ‘Fausse Reconnaissance (“déjà raconté”) in Psycho-AnalyticTreatment’, C.P., 2, 334; Standard Ed.,14.]
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Die Schlaf- und Traumzustände der menschlichen Seele
[The Sleep and Dream Conditions of the Human Soul] [in German]
Spitta H
Freiburg i. B.: J. C. B. Mohr Verlag, 1877
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Das Traumleben und seine Deutung
[Dream life and its interpretation] [in German]
Pfaff EP
Leipzig: L. Denicke Verlag, 1868
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Das Leben des Traums
[The Life of the Dream] [in German]
Scherner KA
Berlin: H. Schindler Verlag, 1861