Abstracts having to do with literary descriptions of déjà experiences
The abstracts are listed in reverse chronological order: the more recent ones are listed first.
In the older literature, there were other terms used for déjà vu: paramnesia, fausse reconnaissance (French), Erinnerungsfälschung or -täuschung (German) and so on. You'll encounter these if you scroll down to the early abstracts (i.e., before 1910 or so).
For those that were published without an abstract (or for which we could not locate one) we have tried to provide some information from the paper or book. We are sure we have not done justice to many of them and would be grateful for suggestions for amendment or correction. There are still many that we have not been able to find abstracts for or make comments on.
To find an author, year, or a specific word, perform a search using CTRL-F.
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Many Faces of Déjà Vu: a Narrative Review
Bošnjak Pašić M1, Horvat Velić E, Fotak L, Pašić H, Srkalović Imširagić A, Milat D, Šarac H, Bjedov S, Petelin GadŽe Ž.
1 University Hospital Centre Zagreb, Department of Neurology, Kišpatićeva 12, 10000 Zagreb, Croatia.
Psychiatria Danubina 30(1):21-25, 2018. doi: 10.24869/psyd.2018.21.
Abstract
French expression standing for the phrase "already seen" is a déjà vu. It is thought that as much as 97% of the population have experienced déjà vu at least once in their lifetime and 67% experience it regularly. The explanations of this phenomenon in novels and poems include reincarnation, dreams, organic factors, and unconscious memories. In this narrative review connection between déjà vu and various other conditions has been mentioned: false memories, temporal lobe epilepsy and other neurological conditions. In psychiatric patients déjà vu phenomenon is more often seen in patients with anxiety and people with derealisation/ depersonalization. It seems that temporal region is the origin of déjà vu phenomena in both healthy individuals and in individuals with neurological and psychiatric conditions, but the exact mechanism of this phenomenon is however still unknown. More attention should also be given to déjà vu from philosophical and religious perspectives as well. Déjà vu is still an enigma which could only be revealed with multidisciplinary approach through cooperation between neurologists, brain scientists, psychiatrists and experimental psychologists.
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Representations of epilepsy on the stage: From the Greeks to the 20th century
Trimble M1, Hesdorffer DC2.
1 Institute of Neurology, Queen Square, London WC1N3BG, United Kingdom. Electronic address:
2 GH Sergievsky Center and Department of Epidemiology, Columbia University, NY, NY, United States.
Epilepsy & Behavior 57(Pt B): 238-42, 2016
Epub 2016 Feb 6. doi: 10.1016/j.yebeh.2016.01.008. PMID: 26857183
Abstract
Epilepsy is a disorder that has been used by dramatists in various ways over the ages and therefore highlights the views of the disorder as people saw it at the time the plays were written and performed. In the 6th century BC, links between tragedy and epilepsy were developed by Greek playwrights, especially Euripides, in Iphigenia among the Taureans and Heracles where epilepsy and madness associated with extreme violence occur together. Both Heracles and Orestes have episodes after a long period of physical exhaustion and nutritional deprivation. During the Renaissance, Shakespeare wrote plays featuring different neurological disorders, including epilepsy. Epilepsy plays a crucial part in the stories of Julius Caesar and Othello. Julius Caesar is a play about politics, and Caesar's epilepsy is used to illustrate his weakness and vulnerability which stigmatizes him and leads to his assassination. Othello is a play about jealousy, and Othello, an outsider, is stigmatized by his color, his weakness, and his 'seizures' as a form of demonic possession. In modern times, Night Mother portrays the hard life of Jessie, who lives with her mother. Jessie has no friends, her father has abandoned the family, and she has no privacy and is ashamed. Stigma and social pressures lead her to commit suicide. Henry James' novella, The Turn of the Screw, portrays a governess with dream-like states, déjà vu, and loss of temporal awareness who has been sent to the country to look after two small children and ends up killing one. This novella was turned into an opera by Benjamin Britten. Most recently, performance art has been portraying epilepsy as the reality of a personally provoked seizure. Both Allan Sutherland and Rita Marcalo have purposely provoked themselves to have a seizure in front of an audience. They do this to show that seizures are just one disability. Whether this provokes stigma in audiences is unknown. Whether the performance artists understand the potential for status epilepticus has not been discussed. This article is part of a Special Issue entitled "Epilepsy, Art, and Creativity".
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What is French for déjà vu? Descriptions of déjà vu in native French and English speakers
Fortier J, Moulin CJA
Laboratoire d’Etude de l’Apprentissage et du développement, CNRS UMR 5022, Université de Bourgogne, Dijon, France
Consciousness and Cognition 36: 12–18, 2015
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2015.05.013
Abstract
Little is known about how people characterise and classify the experience of déjà vu. The term déjà vu might capture a range of different phenomena and people may use it differently. We examined the description of déjà vu in two languages: French and English, hypothesising that the use of déjà vu would vary between the two languages. In French, the phrase déjà vu can be used to indicate a veridical experience of recognition – as in “I have already seen this face before”. However, the same is not true in English. In an online questionnaire, we found equal rates of déjà vu amongst French and English speakers, and key differences in how the experience was described. As expected, the French group described the experience as being more frequent, but there was the unexpected finding that they found it to be more troubling.
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Tsingou, Fermi, Pasta and Ulam recurrent phenomena and the déjà vu
Agüero M, Lourdes N, María de, Ongay F
Universidad Autónoma del Estado de México
Ciencia ergo sum 17(2): 189-196, 2010
http://search.proquest.com/docview/816379565?accountid=14616
Abstract
We provide in this contribution with an informative overview of the research to verify the ergodic theorem on the equipartition of energy in a system of many degrees of freedom. Tsingou, Fermi, Pasta and Ulam (TFPU) in Los Alamos, New Mexico back in the second post-war years, have studied the phenomenon of heat transfer in solids. They have done this research for verifying the ergodic theorem, by means of numerical calculations based on a discrete system of masses connected by nonlinear forces. They discovered a strange phenomenon that was named a posteriori as TFPU recurrent phenomenon. This research laid the cornerstone in the rapid development of the nonlinear solitary wave theories and also in the new method of research by means of numerical experimentation. It was assumed, that this recurrent phenomenon may have its analogue in the physiological sensation called 'Déjà vu'.
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'Temporary Failure of Mind': Déjà vu and Epilepsy in Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho
Schillace BL
Eighteenth-Century Studies 42( 2): 273-287, 2009
http://search.proquest.com/docview/53439799?accountid=14616
Abstract
At the time The Mysteries of Udolpho was published, déjà vu had not been connected to epilepsy. Yet, as déjà vu routinely accompanies epileptic seizures, it is no surprise to find them linked in fiction, even if that link is not clinically explained; the disease and its symptoms pre-exist scientific authentication. Reading Udolpho with an understanding of the epileptic condition 'its relationship to melancholy, its production of anxiety over self-boundaries and its mimicry of madness' opens new possibilities for gothic criticism. As a symptomatic text, The Mysteries of Udolpho connects manifestations of epilepsy to the Gothic's preoccupation with dreamy or altered states.
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Timelessness
Noriega MdJ
Doctoral thesis: Pacifica Graduate Institute, California, 2007
http://search.proquest.com/docview/304717682?accountid=14616
Abstract
We live most of our lives within linear time, which is fixed and static, and we tend to find the experience of timelessness improbable and contrary to the established order of things. Often, the collective and personal experiences of timelessness have been relegated to either pathological or mystical realms. The purpose of this work is to concentrate on timelessness, based upon the atemporality of the unconscious that stem from the depth psychology of Sigmund Freud and Carl Gustav Jung. Using a hemeneutic and heuristic methodology, this phenomenological and theoretical research expands and deepens new understandings of the lived experience of timelessness as a crucial contribution to the process of collective and personal individuation and regeneration, and as an archetypal experience that allows to see things in diverse ways connecting to the imaginal, emotional, sacred, and mythic dimension. In order to deconstruct the superiority of linear time, topics that have sustained it are analyzed such as the myth of Chronos and monotheism vs. polytheism in time, and the symbolism of calendars and clocks. Timelessness is examined through the trinity of time within varied experiences. In the present time timelessness is found in attention and concentration, joy and ecstasy, illness and hope, flow and work. In the past, timelessness appears in memory as suspension of time and its relationship with the loss of paradise, and in the future through the depathologizing of dèjá vu and the analysis of synchronicity and time travel. Slowness is amplified as a precursor to timelessness in daily life and in the analytic encounter. Within the consulting room, timelessness is present in experiences such as waiting, kairos, synchronicity, and timeless presence. This work also contains a depth perspective analysis of artistic manifestations closely related to timelessness. The findings of this research affirm the presence of timelessness, inviting a depth revision of the many forms in which we have nurtured Father Time at the expense of forgetting to care for Mother Timelessness, and reveal the conceptual foundation of what I have termed temporal temenos.
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Déjà-vu
Probst UM
Kunstforum International, Issue 178, 356-357, 2005
http://search.proquest.com/docview/1320248115?accountid=14616
Abstract
Reviews the exhibition 'Der Augen-Blick der Nachträglichkeit in der zeitgenössischen Kunst' at the Atelier Augaren, Zentrum für zeitgenössischen Kunst der Österreichischen Galerie Belvedere, Vienna (20 Oct. 2005-26 Feb. 2006). The author discusses its theme of déjà-vu as defined by Henri Bergson in his 'Le souvenir du présent et la fausse reconnaisance' (1908), and its interpretation in installations and video art by artists including Constantin Luser, Clemens von Wedemeyer, Isabell Heimerdinger, David Thorpe and Jan Mancuska, noting the increasing potential for apparent recognition of images and situations in an age of expanding media for the dissemination of images. She examines the psychological cognitive processes involved, and the methods used by the artists to explore them within the closed space of the museum.
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New techniques for content-based image/video retrieval, classification, and analysis
Chen Y
Doctoral thesis: New York Polytechnic University, 2002
http://search.proquest.com/docview/276263874?accountid=14616
Abstract
In this dissertation, we explored and developed new techniques and methods for image/video retrieval and classification. Various low- and high-level features have been developed. These include augmented histogram, colorfulness, most prominent color, regions computed from DCT coefficients, focus of attention, motion-activity, motion-magnitude, and cut rate. These features, together with other features such as straight lines, text, and human faces form a powerful set of low- and high-level features for image/video retrieval and classification. Their effectiveness is demonstrated in a content-based image retrieval simulation experiment we performed, a knowledge-based video classification prototype system, and a hyper-linked video retrieval prototype system we implemented. We have also explored the use of straightline features for video sub-classification, and camera transform estimation for basketball games. The augmented histogram we developed captures information about the "spatial distribution" of pixels, in addition to the intensity or color count. Since the spatial information is computed globally in terms of relative distance between pixels, it is insensitive to image rotation and translation. The knowledge-based prototype system we developed uses a rule-based implementation to classify video into one of five possible classes. The rules capture human knowledge on how to classify video. We present experimental results to demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach. The hyper-linked video retrieval system is based on the concept of human déjà vu. We present a prototype system called DejaVideo, which uses visual similarity to find similar shots.
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Deja vu. Aberrations of memory in literature and media
Krapp PO
Doctoral thesis: University of California, Santa Barbara, 2000
http://search.proquest.com/docview/287835395?accountid=14616
Abstract
The singular and unrepeatable experience of déjà vu refers to a past that never was; thus it shares a structure not only with fiction, but also with the ever more sophisticated time manipulations and doubling effects of media technology. This thesis historicizes and theorizes déjà vu , proposing that the acceleration of technological progress directly informs the way memory and forgetting have been constructed across various 20th century discourses. As a critique of the tendency to simplify and monumentalize memory in cultural studies, German studies, and media studies, the project emphasizes the role distraction and divided attention play in the configuration of cultural memory. Although the possibility of parapraxis informs notions of the subject since Aristotle's critique of Plato on akrasia or self-deception, the history of déjà vu proper only begins with discussions conducted in France at the end of the nineteenth century. Early theories on mnemopathology yield a pre-Freudian logic of the cover-up. Paramnesia inflects notions of self-deception and the secret in the work of Sigmund Freud, inversion and the envelope of space-time in Walter Benjamin's media theory, Heiner Müller's writing on kitsch and monument, repetition and aura in the industrial art of Andy Warhol, and cinematic violence as explored by Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven . Each chapter also focuses on the question of the feminine, which from Nietzsche to the present is intricately connected with questions of time and repetition. With the aid of contemporary theories of technology and media, "Déjà vu" refines the discourse on aberrations of cultural memory to offer a comprehensive profile of the cultural and theoretical significance of the déjà vu effect, spanning a century from discussions of psychopathology in the 1890s to the media theories of the 1990s. In so doing, this thesis offers an account of how the specific cultural effects of paramnesia drive our attention economy.
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Déjà Vu
Orloff J
In: Second Sight, Warner Books, N. Y., pp. 260-267, 1996
("[Déjà vu] is a signal to pay special attention to what is taking place, perhaps to receive a specific lesson or to complete what is not yet finished.... Déjä vu is an offering, an opportunity for additional knowledge about ourselves and others." p. 261)
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Deja vu
Lazerson BH
http://search.proquest.com/docview/85599861?accountid=14616
American Speech 69(3): 285-293, 1994
Abstract
The evolution of the use of the French term deja vu 'already seen' in English, from its beginnings as an obscure psychological term in 1903 to its variety of modern usages, is traced. A list of current terms based on or derived from the original phrase, & with definitions & examples, is provided.
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Art imitates life: Déjà vu experiences in prose and poetry
Sno HN, Linszen DH, de Jonghe F
Psychiatric Outpatient Clinic, Academic Medical Centre, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
British Journal of Psychiatry 160: 511-8, 1992
Abstract
The déjà vu experience is a subjective phenomenon that has been described in many novels and poems. Here we review over 20 literary descriptions. These accounts are consistent with the data obtained from psychiatric literature, including various phenomenological, aetiological and psychopathogenetic aspects of the déjà vu experience. The explanations, explicitly formulated by creative authors, include reincarnation, dreams, organic factors and unconscious memories. Not infrequently, an association with defence or organic factors is demonstrable on the basis of psychoanalytic or clinical psychiatric interpretation. The authors recommend that psychiatrists be encouraged to overstep the limits of psychiatric literature and read prose and poetry as well.
Comments:
Iron Maiden's déjà vu. Plummer B, British Journal of Psychiatry 161: 134, 1992
Descriptions of psychiatric conditions in literature. Cohen RN, British Journal of Psychiatry 161: 280-1, 1992
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Out on a Broken Limb
Smith FL
Harvest House, Eugene, OR, 1986
("We've all experienced deja vu -- the feeling that we've been in a given circumstance or environment before, and that we are reenacting a scene we've acted out at a previous time. We all seem to have a kind of "sixth sense" about certain things or certain people -- an intuition beyond our normal physical senses. Most of us have had the feeling, when first introduced to certain people, that we've known them before." p. 44)
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Borrowed sight: The halted traveller in Caspar David Friedrich and William Wordsworth
Koerner JL
Word & Image: A Journal of Verbal/Visual Enquiry 1(2): 149-163, 1985
("As in déjà-vu, the poet's sense of return or repetition involves something lost." p. 160)
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Dream Thief
Lawhead S
Lion Publications, Pie, UK 1983
("It was the same sense of déjà vu pricked before at various times along the way. He felt he really did recognize the place. But this time the scene carried with it none of the strange panic that used to seize him in his dreams. Of course. That was it! His dreams! -- he had been here in his dreams.")
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Out on a Limb
MacLaine S
Elm Tree Books, London, 1983
("They talk about a kind of 'veil of forgetfulness' that exists in the conscious mind so that we aren't continually traumatized by what might have occurred before. They all say that the present lifetime is the important one, only sparked now and then by those déjà vu feelings that you have experienced something before or know someone that you know you've never consciously met before in this lifetime. You know those feelings you sometimes get that you've been somewhere before only you know you haven't?" p. 106. Also see pp. 156, 192-3, and 224.)
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"Where or When": Still mystery and magic in the guise of "déjà vu"
Kohn SR
Journal of the Medical Society of New Jersey 76(2): 101-104, 1979
(This paper includes an excellent bibliography of literary sources.)
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A time for forecast
Conklin B
In: A Little Book of Yankee Humor. Yankee, Inc., Dublin, NH, 1977
(He makes a funny remark about déjà vu on p. 14.)
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Arthur Schnitzler's Die Frau mit dem Dolche: Deja Vu Experience or Hypnotic Trance?
Berlin, Jeffrey B
Journal of the International Arthur Schnitzler Research Association 7: 108-112, 1974
http://search.proquest.com/docview/54080065?accountid=14616
Abstract
Schnitzler's Die Frau mit dem Dolche concerns Pauline's relationships with her husband and with Leonhard, her lover. In a museum with Leonhard, she likens herself to a particular painting. As she observes it, the scene changes and reveals her thoughts in the form of a fantasy. Why does she identify with the painting? What is the nature of her experience as Paola in the trance scene? Why does she kill her lover in the trance? These issues are examined by investigating Pauline's psychological processes. It is shown that while the trance scene may seem to be a déjà vu experience, it is actually a self-induced hypnotic trance that permits repressed material to emerge from the unconscious and thus represents an attempt to effect abreaction.
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Man and Time
Priestley JB
NYC: Dell Publishing, 1968
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The Personality of Man
Tyrrell GNM
London: Penguin Books, 1947
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Hammer und Ambos
[Hammer and anvil] [in German]
Spielhagen F
Schwerin i/M: A. Hildebrand Verlag 1869, p. 72
(Translated from the German: "as though I had seen all this sometime already once before ...")
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In the garden of sleep
Scott C
A chapter in: Arrowsmith's Summer Annual -- Travelers Tales, Arrowsmith's Bristol Library, Vol. 5, 1892, pp. 115-131
("Among the curious experiences of Life none is stranger or more mysterious than the accidental visiting of a new spot, and the sudden consciousness that you have seen it all before. Without any warning it suddenly flashes upon you, "It is not new at all. At some time or other I have visited this very place." I most cordially own that this has often happened to me at strange places, not only in England, but elsewhere; and the feeling to me, and to others, is inexplicable.
There are times when a chance conversation suggests the idea: "Just these very words spoken to me at that exact spot."
But how often, with intense suddenness, a dream of the past is revealed!
'How is it? This is not the first time I have been here? I remember it all as if it were yesterday--in a dream, in a picture, in the flower-fields of imagination. I have certainly been here.' p. 117)
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The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table
(1858)
Holmes OW
Everyman's Library, NY, 1960
(There is a lengthy description of the characteristics of déjà vu experiences based on what was known at that time [1858]. pp. 11, 69-71)
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Julius oder die Bibliothek des Oheims (13. Teil)
[Julius or the Oheim Library (part 13)] [in German]
Zschokke H
Aarau: K. R. Sauerländer Verlag, 1851
("'Ach, Fräulein, wenn man immer fände, was man suchte!' -- seufzt ich, und während ich die Worte sprach, ward mir, als wäre das schon einmal da gewesen, wie jetzt, und ich dachte mir ihre Antwort voraus: 'Oft findet man auch besseres, als man sucht.' Doch dach' ich dies nur flüchtig und unklar. Aber sie entgegnete, was ich gedacht hatte: 'Oft findet man Besseres, als man sucht.'" p. 227)
["'Oh, girl, if one always found what one is looking for!' -- I sighed, and while I spoke the words, it seemed to me as it was once as it is now, and I had thought of an answer in advance: 'Often one also finds something better than that which one has searched for.' However I thought this only in passing and vaguely. But she replied what I had thought: 'Often one finds something better than that which one has searched for.'"]
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Near Oxford
Hawthorne N
In: Our Old Home (1863) 1912 Riverside Edition. Houghton Mifflin Co., Boston.
(On a visit to the ruins of Stanton Harcourt in Oxford, Hawthorne experienced an eerie sense of recognition [déjà visité]. He was later able to trace it to a passage in a text he had once read by Alexander Pope. [pp. 218-220])
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The Personal History, Adventures, Experience and Observation of David Copperfield the Younger of Blunderstone Rookery (which he never meant to be published on any account)
Dickens C
Chapter 39 (Wickfield and Heep), London: Bradbury & Evans, 1850
"We have all some experience of a feeling, that comes over us occasionally, of what we are saying and doing having been said and done before, in a remote time--of our having been surrounded, dim ages ago, by the same faces, objects, and circumstances--of our knowing perfectly what will be said next, as if we suddenly remembered it! I never had this mysterious impression more strongly in my life, than before he uttered those words."
(The full text is available on-line at http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/766/pg766.txt.)
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Speculations on metaphysics
Shelley PB
In: The Works of Percy Byssche Shelley in Verse and Prose, H. B. Forman (ed.). London: Reeves & Turner, 1880
("The scene was a common scene ... The effect that it produced on me was not such as could have been expected. I suddenly remembered to have seen that exact scene in some dream of long ... "Here I was obliged to leave off, overcome by thrilling horror!" [p. 297])
(His widow, Mary Shelley, assigned the fragment bearing the heading "Catalogue of the Phenomena of Dreams, as Connecting Sleeping and Waking" to 1815, seven years before his death.)
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Guy Mannering or The Astrologer
Scott, Sir Walter
James Ballantyne & Co., Edinburgh, 1815
("'Why is it,' he thought, continuing to follow out the succession of ideas which the scene prompted, -- 'why is it that some scenes awaken thoughts which belong as it were to dreams of early and shadowy recollection, such as my old Brahmin Moonshie would have ascribed to a state of previous existence? Is it the visions of our sleep that float confusedly in our memory, and are recalled by the appearance of such real objects as in any respect correspond to the phantoms they presented to our imagination? How often do we find ourselves in society which we have never before met, and yet feel impressed with a mysterious and ill-defined consciousness, that neither the scene, the speakers, nor the subject, are entirely new; nay, feel as if we could anticipate that part of the conversation which has not yet taken place!' p. 294).
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On the Trinity
St. Augustine
ca. ACE 417
Book XII, Chapter XV
("it may be conjectured that these were untrue recollections, such as we commonly experience in sleep, when we fancy we remember, as though we had done or seen it, what we never did or saw at all; and that the minds of these persons, even though awake, were affected in this way at the suggestion of malignant and deceitful spirits, whose care it is to confirm or to sow some false beliefconcerning the changes of souls, in order to deceive men.")
Book XII is available here: http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/130112.htm
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Metamorphoses
Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso)
Book XV, 161-4, ~8 AD