The story of a man who lived in a permanent Déjà Vu

It has happened to all of us at some point in our lives: have 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 the present had been unfolded into two exact replicas. It is a phenomenon known as Deja 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 way to a little-known mental disorder.

This is what happened to a French army officer in the late 19th century: he believed that he was living in a series of replicas of the past, as if everyone insisted on recreating situations already lived.

Louis' pathological Déjà Vu case: trapped in time

This case was documented in 1896 by a psychiatrist named Francois-Léon Arnaud, Y has been translated and published recently in the scientific journal Cortex by a team led 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

In the text translated by Bertrand and his team, some of the situations experienced by a young officer are described. of the Army that, after serving in Vietnam, he was sent back to his home after beginning to develop a series of symptom. Louis, because this was the name of the military man, he constantly confused the past with the present. He believed that he was experiencing exact replicas of what had happened months or years ago.

After having started to suffer from intermittent fever probably caused by malaria, toappeared in Louis an unwarranted exhaustion, insomnia and digestive problems, and retrograde and anterograde amnesia, so despite remembering most of the important information related to his life and his identity, he had difficulty remembering what had happened just a few years ago. minutes. This caused that, many times, he was repeating the same question over and over again, even if it had been answered just before.

And of course, Louis began to suffer the so-called pathological Déjà Vu shortly after, in 1893. Although Louis had assured that he experienced Déjà Vus very frequently as a child, at that time he not only experienced them all the time, but also he 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 the that he claimed to have read several newspaper articles before, even claiming 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 what he was reading before, poco later it spread to more areas of his life and became more frequent.

At the wedding of her brother, for example, he assured aloud that he remembered perfectly having attended this same one. ceremony a year ago, with the same guests, in the same place and with all the details arranged in a identical. He also pointed out that he did not understand why they were repeating the wedding again.

As the symptoms worsened and the pathological Déjà Vu spread its influence throughout the areas of Louis's life, there was also a tendency towards paranoid thoughts and mania persecutory. He believed that his parents were supplying him with drugs to make him forget about his plans to marry the woman he liked and reacted violently to normal actions and everyday.

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 who come into contact with an unknown person for the first time in a normal situation behave. Right after, Louis's expression became much more friendly and familiar.

I recognize you, doctor. It is you who greeted me a year ago at the same time and in the same room. He asked me the same questions he asks me now, and I gave him the same answers. He does very well when it comes to being surprised, but he can stop now.

Louis believed he had already been to the Vanves Sanitarium. He had recognized the land on which it is located, his facilities, and at that time also the people who worked on it. Despite Arnaud's denying that all this had happened in the past, he did not seem to convince Louis. Soon 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 entered the institution.

Are you sure it's a pathological Déjà Vu?

Although the symptoms Louis experienced are closely related to the way classic Déjà Vu is expressed, Julie Bertrand propose the explanation that, in fact, what was happening to this patient was not Déjà Vu, at least technically. Rather, it would be an unconscious mechanism by which the memory gaps produced by amnesia are filled..

This would explain why Louis was not able to distinguish between the real past and the "artificial" past created by these situations. What he lived was, rather, a reduplicative paramnesia, an illusion in which common sense fades. 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.