Abstract

In this chapter, the authors begin with a brief history of the interpretations that have been given – from the middle of the 19th Century to the present day, to the phenomenon of déjà‐vu that psychological disorder leads us to believe that they have already experienced in an undetermined past the situation they are experiencing. In 1904 and 1906, psychologist Gérard Heymans wrote the reports of two investigations linking the déjà‐vu phenomenon to another psychic experience, also fleeting: “depersonalization”, a sudden state that disappears just as suddenly, and in which everything we perceive seems foreign to us, including ourselves – we then have the feeling of not speaking or acting, but perceiving our actions and words as inactive spectators. If this necessary condition is met, we can speak of a successful inscription of the representation‐occurrence in its memory, whose representation in our model is then that of the specious present of the individual actor concerned.