It has happened to all of us at some point in our lives: having the feeling that we have already seen, heard or done something that is happening. In exactly the same way, and in the same place. All traced, as if the past and present had been unfolded into two exact replicas. This is a phenomenon known as Déjà Vu and it is very normal for it to occur, because it is part of the normal functioning of our brain. However, in some very rare cases, Déjà Vu could give rise to a little-known mental disorder.
This is what happened to a French army officer at the end of the 19th century : I believed that I was living in a series of replicas of the past, as if everyone was determined to recreate situations that had already been experienced.
Louis’s case of pathological Déjà Vu: trapped in time
This case was documented in 1896 by a psychiatrist named Francois-Léon Arnaud and has been recently translated and published in the scientific journal cortex by a team headed by the psychologist Julie Bertrand. It is also one of the first scientific articles in which the term Déjà Vu is used to refer to this type of phenomenon.
Living in the past…literally
The text translated by Bertrand and his team describes some of the situations experienced by a young army officer who, after serving in Vietnam, was sent back home after beginning to develop a series of symptoms. Louis, because this was the name of the soldier, I constantly confused the past with the present. He believed she was experiencing exact replicas of what had happened months or years ago.
After having started to suffer from intermittent fever probably caused by malaria, toLouis appeared to have unjustified exhaustion, insomnia and digestive problems. and retrograde and anterograde amnesia, whereby, despite remembering most of the important information related to his life and identity, he had difficulty remembering what had happened just a few minutes ago. This meant that, many times, she would repeat the same question over and over again, even though it had been answered just before.
And of course Louis began to suffer from the so-called pathological Déjà Vu shortly afterwards, in 1893. Although Louis had claimed that as a child he experienced Déjà Vus very frequently, at that time he not only experienced them all the time, but he also did not believe that they were illusions. He was convinced that the repetition of past experiences was absolutely real.
Everything is repeating
Among the anecdotes that serve to illustrate the case of pathological Déjà Vu documented by Arnaud is the time in which he claimed to have previously read several newspaper articles, going so far as to maintain that he himself was the author of some of them.
Although at first Louis’s pathological Déjà Vu was only related to the feeling of having read before what he was reading, pShortly afterwards it spread to more areas of his life and became more frequent.
At his brother’s wedding, for example, he said out loud that he perfectly remembered having attended this same ceremony a year ago, with the same guests, in the same place and with all the details placed identically. He also noted that he didn’t understand why they were repeating the wedding again.
As the symptoms worsened and the pathological Déjà Vu spread its influence throughout all areas of Louis’ life, a tendency towards paranoid thoughts and persecution mania also appeared. He believed that his parents were giving him drugs to make him forget about his plans to marry the woman he liked and reacted violently to normal, everyday actions.
Louis was around 35 years old when he entered the Maison de Santé in the French municipality of Vanves. There, in 1894, he met Arnaud.
Louis and Arnaud meet
When Louis first saw Arnaud, this is what happened:
At first, Louis behaved the way people behave when they come into contact with a stranger for the first time in a normal situation. Right after, Louis’s expression became much gentler and more familiar.
I already recognize you, doctor. It is you who greeted me a year ago at the same time and in the same room. You asked me the same questions you ask me now, and I gave you the same answers. He does a very good job of pretending to be surprised, but he can stop now.
Louis believed he had already been to the Vanves sanatorium. He had recognized the land on which it is located, its facilities, and at that time also the people who worked there. Although Arnaud denied that any of this had happened in the past, he did not seem to convince Louis. Shortly after, a similar conversation took place when the patient met another doctor.
Scenes like this would define the type of mental disorder for which Louis was admitted to the institution.
Although the symptoms that Louis experienced are closely related to the way classic Déjà Vu is expressed, Julie Bertrand proposes the explanation that, in fact, what was happening to this patient was not Déjà Vu, at least technically. It would rather be an unconscious mechanism by which the memory gaps produced by amnesia are filled in.
This would explain why Louis was not able to distinguish between the real past and the “artificial” past created by these situations. What he experienced was, rather, a reduplicative paramnesia, an illusion in which common sense vanishes. One more example of the extent to which changes in our nervous system can change us even in those mental faculties that we take for granted.
