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.
Arlow applies the methods of dream analysis to the specific setting and details of the déjà vu experience, and demonstrates that each manifest element in the experience is richly determined by the latent connections it symbolizes and stimulates. The reality issue that is reacted to in the characteristic term of 'all this has been experienced before' stands, like manifest dream content, as a symbolic condensation of and disguise for repressed memories fraught with anxiety. The origin of the disturbance is attributed to the external situation in order to suppress the threatening inner memory and offer a screen or substitute. This defensive maneuver minimizes the threat as unreal, dreamlike, or past, and offers the reassurance: 'this is familiar—I survived this before'. The sense of prophetic foreknowledge gives further assurance through asserting control by magic omnipotence. Whatever anxiety cannot be bound by these devices contributes to the sense of uncanniness and unpleasantness characteristic of déjà vu. The price of this defensive effort is a transitory deterioration of the important ego function of reality sensing. It is not a compromise formation like a symptom. It differs from a delusion in its ready amenability to critical, discriminating judgment, but may be a part of the delusional process in which its function is again to depreciate dangerous reality as something already mastered or controllable by the omnipotence of prophetic foresight.