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Minor disturbances in reality appreciation are phenomena of erroneous recognition (déjà vu, déjà raconté, déjà vecu). Déjà vu (the patient fails to get the impression of a new reality but feels instead an obscure similarity with some past experience) has a disconcerting and unpleasant affect. In addition to the statements concerning déjà vu made by Freud (awakening of an old, unconscious, wishful fantasy of improvement of the situation) and by Ferenczi (the obscure similarity refers to analogous situations in dreams of long ago), the author gives some valuable suggestions as to the functional and economic aspects. In some cases, he thinks, it is 'a reactivation of circumstances which have actually been encountered but have been suppressed or repressed', associated with an unconscious conflict of purposive planning in connection with, and at the time of, the original situation. Thus, déjà vu constitutes an alert defense reaction which deprives the current situation of the threatening qualities of the original, 'an effort at protection, through reaffirmation against the reality of the present'. Having seen the same before, means that survival will be possible. Three cases were observed in psychoanalysis. One patient thought that the déjà vu feeling gave him the power of prognostication.