Terminology

At the turn of the century there were many terms being used to designate this experience, in addition to "déjà vu". This term itself first entered the scientific literature, it seems, in 1876. A Professor of Philosophy at a classical high school in Poitiers, M. Boirac (1876), had a letter published in the Revue Philosophique in which he spoke of “le sentiment du déjà vu”. He described his own experiences and classified them as one type of illusionary memory. However, his use of the terminology was forgotten. Dugas (1894), in his paper on false memories, credits La1ande (1893) with having first used the term, though he only used it along with several others.

It was in 1895 that the term "déjà vu" was officially proposed by M Arnaud at a meeting of the Societe medico-psychologique to designate the phenomenon. He objected that the other terminologies such as false recognition, false memory, paramnesia and reminiscence, were too broad. He felt that "already seen" more nearly fitted the experience as it was encountered (it is also more neutral from a theoretical point of view). This suggestion was taken up by a number of writers, including Prof Pierre Janet (1905). who had been present at the meeting. It was taken over, too, into popular parlance, since it was short and to the point. "Déjà vécu (already lived), as a number of authors have insisted, would probably have been more accurate and a better choice, but it never gained wide acceptance.

The other terms persisted in the technical literature for a while, however, with “paramnesia" being the other most widely preferred, particularly in English-language publications. This term was apparently due to Burnham (1888/89) who published a long study on memory in the American Journal of Psychology. His third section he entitled "Paramnesia", a term which it seems he devised, but which he claimed had been suggested by Prof Emil Kraepelin (1886). My suspicion is that it is his “Graecised” form of Kraepelin's ("erinnerungsfälschung”).