You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Although psychoanalytic literature abounds in allusions to the phenomenon of déjà vu, few communications can be found devoted primarily to an analysis of this interesting psychological state. The experience is reputedly a very common one, occurring frequently in persons otherwise considered quite normal as well as in association with various psychoneurotic and psychotic disturbances. Some observers note that déjà vu is to be seen regularly in children and in adolescents, its appearance being facilitated by states of fatigue, stress, illness (13), (21), (24), etc. (factors which presumably favor regression or the emergence of repressed material). In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud (11) commented on the significance of déjà vu. He said that when the phenomenon of déjà vu is related in a dream to a landscape, it indicates some reference to the mother's body and/or genitals "concerning which one can maintain with absolute certainty 'I've been there before.'" In literature and in the cinema déjà vu has been described and employed with dramatic effect and wide appeal. Déjà vu phenomena are said to be especially prominent in brain-damaged individuals (3), (22), (23) and in the experience of soldiers on the way to battle (19). In addition, it has been observed as part of the aura of grand mal seizures and in relation with petit mal seizures of children (3), (24).
In his early comments on déjà vu Freud (12) emphasized the activation of an unconscious impression, "In such moments, something is really touched that we have already experienced, only we cannot consciously recall the latter [event] because it was never