A Contribution to the Psychoanalysis of Déjà Vu

Freud's statement that the subject, déjà vu, 'is worthy of the most minute study' has stimulated but few psychoanalytic contributions to the problem. Freud's study of a case, published in 1904, is paradigmatic and explains the phenomenon as the result of an unconscious fantasy: 'The feeling of déjà vu corresponds to the memory of an unconscious fantasy'. Freud's example was a hysterical patient who experienced déjà vu while visiting some friends. The patient knew that the brother of her friends was very sick. She too had a brother who shortly before the visit had been seriously ill with diphtheria. The expectation that her brother would die had been much in her mind. 'She might consciously have remembered that she had lived through a similar situation a few months before, but instead of recalling what was inhibited through repression, she transferred the memory feeling to the locality.'

Ferenczi1 in 1912 published a case from which he reasoned that dreams can have a connection with déjà vu. His patient brought to analysis a dream with an unconscious homosexual content. Instead of producing a recollection, the patient at first experienced déjà vu. Federn2 believes that déjà vu consists of a very brief depersonalization. Schilder3 in describing a manic depressive female patient having cannibalistic fantasies, said, 'Perhaps, too, the peculiar form of déjà vu in our patient is connected with the wish that everything should have been at some time an object of her sadism'. Oberndorf4