Something similar
Within this category of explanation are included a broad spectrum of déjà vu theories. The idea is basically simple: one has somehow had an experience that is similar to the present one and the feeling of recognition spreads to include the entire encounter. The source of the first experience could be within the outer world, i.e., in daily life; or it could come from within, in the form of dream or fantasy. There is thus an element of coincidence involved.
There is certainly no doubt that such a mechanism is often at work. People many times have the impression that they find familiar or even recognize a place, person, smell, or tune, only to find out later that it isn't possible. An error has been committed; something has been mistaken for something else or one has met with a case of mistaken identity.
Quite often, the explanation is right at hand. One knows immediately what he thought he was seeing. Other times, it may require a good bit of detective work to discover the reason for the mistaken impression, particularly if this has come from the unconscious. There has been a goodly number of psychoanalytic theorists, following Freud, who have taken this tack in their analysis of déjà vu experiences. Thus seen, it becomes a projection mechanism in which some aspect or figure from the inner world has been "seen" in the outer.
In the 1907 edition of The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, Freud wrote, "... the feeling of déjà vu corresponds to the recollection of an unconscious fantasy" (Standard Edition, p. 266). Later, in the 1910 edition, he went a bit further, quoting Ferenczi as saying that the déjà vu experiences of a patient of his "regularly proved to have originated from a forgotten (repressed) portion of a dream of the preceding night. It seems therefore that 'déjà vu' can derive not only from daydreams but from night-dreams as well" (p. 268). In 1917, he added a note saying that Grasset in 1904 had independently published a similar theory.
Actually, Emminghaus in his General Psychopathology had already in 1878 written the following (my translation):
"... the entire situation can be held as being identical to an earlier apperception -- may it be an observed, dreamed, or only fantasized one -- only because maybe isolated pregnant parts of both presentation complexes have at least similarity with one another." (p. 131)
Moreover, Paul Radestock came to similar conclusions in his 1879 book, Sleep and Dreaming. More to the point, according to Sully (p. 259 - see next paragraph), he actually kept a dream diary and found correspondences between elements of his déjà vu experiences and some diary entries!
In 1881, the English doctor, James Sully, published a book entitled The Illusions. His tenth chapter was devoted to illusions of memory and there he presented a theory that déjà vu experiences could be based on dream memories. He conjectured that dreams were a transformation process in which impressions from daily life were joined in new combinations and thus it was easily possible that there would occasionally be correspondences with later events. He quoted from Paul Radestock's dream diary research and felt that this gave support to his theory. In the same paragraph, he made the interesting comment:
"One often says that science destroys all beautiful thoughts about nature and life; but while it destroys, it also creates them. Is it not an almost romantic idea that just as our waking life is represented in our dreams, so can our dream life send back some of its shadowy phantoms into our prosaic everyday life, and illuminate it with a reflection of its own magical beauty."
Other writers of that period with similar ideas include Buccola (l883), Osborne (l884), Scott (l892), Lapie (l894), Thibault, (1899), and Mere (1903).
The psychoanalysts, following Freud, have not been so interested in the mechanism involved in bringing the déjà vu about. They have rather wanted to know what part it plays within the psychic economy as a whole: what is its function, what is achieved with it? Freud himself added a passage to the 1909 edition of The Interpretation of Dreams in which he wrote:
"In some dreams of landscapes or other localities, emphasis is laid in the dream itself on a convinced feeling of having been there before. These places are invariably the genitals of the dreamer's mother; there is indeed no other place about which one can assert with such conviction that one has been there once before." (p. 399)
It should be noted, though, that the experience Freud here described differs from déjà vu in two important ways: one can just as well have the impression that one has been there several times before -- not just once; and, the focus is on a locality, not a situation. Although Freud in 1914 identified this experience with déjà vu, it would be better termed déjà visité, a point I shall return to later in section on reincarnation (below).
In 1904, Freud made a trip with his brother to Athens and visited the Acropolis. There he had an experience of derealization, as if what he was seeing was not real. He recounted this in a letter published in 1936 entitled "A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis". There he distinguished derealization from the related phenomenon of depersonalization, in that with the former, a piece of outer reality feels strange, while with the latter, a piece of one's own self seems foreign and unfamiliar. He then went on to remark that in déjà vu "... we seek to accept something as belonging to our ego, just as in the derealization we are anxious to keep something out of us." (p. 245) He continues and says that the latter, then, is a defense mechanism. (A fascinating analysis of Freud's Acropolis experience was published by Slochower [1970].)
Subsequent psycho-analytic authors have also claimed that déjà vu can be considered as a defense mechanism, but they have differed as to what should constitute the antagonist. Bergler (1942) said that Freud and Ferenczi (1955) believed the ego used déjà vu experiences to avoid id impulses. He offered examples where it seemed that pangs of conscience (super-ego) were being defended against. Arlow (1959) thought it could involve repression and reassurance in the face of anxiety ("I've been through this before."), and an attempt at omnipotence ("I knew it all along."). Oberndorf (1941) has published similar ideas. Fenichel (1974) saw repressed memories as a possible source of the anxiety.
Marcowitz (1952) wrote that déjà vu was the expression of a wish for a second chance, to back in the same situation again. Pacella (1975) , going further, saw it as an attempted return, not to mother's genitals (and womb) as in Freud, but contact with her face, basing his theory on recent work concerning infantile development. He believes many déjà vu episodes are triggered by seeing another person's face. Finally Schneck (1961) insists that most probably no one explanation will do, that the underlying psychological "causes" are as varied as the individuals involved.
I have no great quarrel with most of these thoughts. I find the last one especially appealing. I do find Freud's idea that there is a symbolic return to the mother's genitals a bit far-fetched, and I cannot remember a déjà vu experience that was set off by visual contact with someone's face. It may be worth noting that there is a marked difference in attitude between those theorists who have experienced déjà vu themselves (e.g., Pötzl, 1926), and those who have not (e.g., Arlow, 1959, who speaks of "attacks" of déjà vu).
Further, I do not think that cases of mistaken identity, erroneous recognition, and false familiarity should be lumped together with déjà vu. Whereas the notion of partial similarity might well explain the former, what makes the latter experience so intense is the detailed agreement of all particulars and the frequent conviction that one knows the situational unfoldment before it occurs. The utter banality and everydayness of most déjà vu feelings also make it difficult to believe that complicated psychological defense mechanisms are at work in every case.