#Psychoanalysts and deja vu theory full

Interestingly, the example he refers to immediately prior to his brief comments on deja vu, from the Wolf Man case history, is the same reminiscence the Wolf Man recounts to Freud and that Freud returns to in his 1914 paper onВ dГ©jГ racontГ© on the grounds that the Wolf Man is sure that he has already conveyed it to Freud before. However, two years earlier in Seminar I, Lacan does presentВ dГ©jГ vu as indicating a forgotten experience thanks to the influence of repression, but suggests that it is, much more radically, one that has been rejected. This is what gives the subject the impression that he has already seen the context, the scene, of the present momentвЂќ (Seminar III, p.111-112).

#Psychoanalysts and deja vu theory full

deja vu occurs when a situation is lived through with a full symbolic meaning which reproduces a homologous symbolic situation that has been previously lived through but forgotten, and which is lived through again without the subjectвЂ™s understanding it in all its detail.

вЂњWe could describe the sense of dГ©jГ vu, which as been such a problem for psychologists, as a homonym вЂ“ itвЂ™s always a symbolic key that half-opens the mainspring. Whilst Lacan does not specifically refer to this passage in Freud, he clearly has it in mind when he gives a very similar interpretation ofВ dГ©jГ vu in Seminar III: From the fact that repression occurred we may conclude that her former expectation of her brotherвЂ™s death had not been far removed from a wishful phantasyвЂќ (SE VI, 267).

вЂњShe ought to have remembered consciously that she herself had lived through this situation a few months before : instead of remembering it вЂ“ which was prevented by repression вЂ“ she transferred her feeling of remembering something to her surroundings, the garden and the house, and fell a victim to the вЂ fausse reconaissanceвЂ of having seen all this exactly the same once before. The womanвЂ™s own brother had fallen gravely ill a short while previous to this, and Freud detects an unconscious fantasy of being left as the only child were he to die, which motivates the repression leading to the experience of dГ©jГ vu: Rather than focusing on the house itself, Freud focuses on the way the friendвЂ™s circumstances mirror her own, namely in the presence in the house of a seriously ill brother, potentially close to death. So when we experienceВ dГ©jГ vu we should subject it to the same associative process that we do for dreams, slips or symptoms.ДЇreud recounts the experience of a female patient who finds it uncanny that when she visits her friendвЂ™s house for the first time she has the experience of having been there before, and feels she knows every room in the house before she walks into it. The fantasy is unconscious by virtue of its having been repressed, and the displacement at work allows us to think ofВ dГ©jГ vu as an effect of the primary processes on unconscious material. Instead of being conscious of this fantasy we displace it onto a situation that represents its fulfilment, in much the same way as in dreams. For the sake of full disclosure it should be mentioned in passing that Freud credits the French neurologist Joseph Grasset with a very similar theory of dГ©jГ vu but was not aware of his 1904 work on the subject when Freud came to add his remarks onВ dГ©jГ vu to the second edition of The Psychopathology of Everyday Life in 1907.ДЇor Freud then, the sensation of having experienced something before occurs when we encounter a situation analogous to one in an unconscious wishful fantasy. It is rather that at such moments something is really touched on which we have already experienced once before, only we cannot consciously remember it because it has never been consciousвЂќ (SE VI, 266).

Thus вЂњIt is in my view wrong to call the feeling of having experienced something before an illusion. Rather than focusing on вЂhere and nowвЂ™ of the personвЂ™s physical or mental state, or what they are doing at the time, Freud detects the influence of an unconscious dynamic stemming from repressed desires. In The Psychopathology of Everyday Life Freud links the experience ofВ dГ©jГ vuВ to unconscious fantasies.