Defining the Deja Experience

It took nearly a century to settle on a common term for the deja vu experience. From the mid-1800s to the mid-1900s, researchers used a variety of words and phrases in different languages to describe the phenomenon.

Berrios (1995) and Findler (1998) suggested that the term deja vu was first used in a statement by Arnaud (1896), whereas Cutting and Silzer (1990) pointed to the first use by Hughlings-Jackson (1888). Sno (1994), Neppe (1983) and Funkhouser (1983) claimed that Boirac (1876) first used the term de ´ja `vu (“la sensation du de ´ja ` vu”) in a letter to the editor.

Although the term deja vu was clearly introduced in the late 1800s, it did not come into common usage until many decades later. Sno and Linszen (1990) provided a list of 17 different terms (from three languages) that have previously been used to describe the deja vu phenomenon (from paramnesia to illusion of the already seen to sentiment of pre-existence), and Neppe (1983e) gave a chronology of the use of these terms.

Table 1 presents passages from textbooks published by prominent psychologists (Angell, 1908; James, 1890;Titchener, 1928; Woodworth, 1940) that illustrate the diversity of early references to the experience, even into the mid-twentieth century.

These descriptions show that earlier experimental psychologists evaluated the deja vu experience as relatively common and tended to classify it as a disorder, illusion, or hallucination of memory.

The following definition proposed by Neppe (1983e) has recently become the standard in research on deja vu: “any subjectively inappropriate impression of familiarity of a present experience with an undefined past”.