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

Louis' case: trapped in time because of a rare psychological disorder.

It has happened to all of us at some point in our lives: to have the feeling that we have already seen, heard or done something that is happening. In exactly the same way, and in exactly the same place. Everything is exactly the same, as if the past and the present had unfolded into two exact replicas. This is a phenomenon known as Déjà Vu and it is quite normal to occur, because it is part of the normal functioning of our brain. However, in some very rare cases, Déjà Vu could shape a little known mental disorder.

This is what happened to a French army officer at the end of the 19th centuryHe believed he was living in a series of replicas of the past, as if everyone was trying to recreate situations he had already experienced.

Louis' Pathological Déjà Vu Case: Trapped in Time

This case was documented in 1896 by a psychiatrist named Francois-Léon Arnaudand has recently been 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 to use the term Déjà Vu to refer to this type of phenomena.

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, for this was the officer's name, constantly confused the past with the present. He believed he was living exact replicas of what had happened months or years before.

After starting to suffer from intermittent fever probably caused by malaria, aLouis appeared to be suffering from unwarranted exhaustion, insomnia and digestive problems, and retrograde and anterograde amnesia.He was suffering from a severe case of retrograde and anterograde amnesia, whereby, although he remembered most of the important information related to his life and identity, he had difficulty remembering what had happened just a few minutes before. This meant that he was often repeating 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 soon after, in 1893.. Although Louis had claimed that as a child he experienced Déjà Vus very often, at that time he not only experienced them all the time, but also did not believe that they were illusions. He was convinced that the repetition of past experiences was absolutely real.

Everything repeats itself

Among the anecdotes that serve to illustrate the case of pathological Déjà Vu documented by Arnaud is the time when he claimed to have read several newspaper articles before, going so far as to claim that he himself was the author of some of them.

Although at first Louis' pathological Déjà Vu was only related to the feeling of having read before what was being read, pome time later it spread to more areas of his life and became more frequent..

At his brother's wedding, for example, he stated aloud that he remembered perfectly well attending this same ceremony a year ago, with the same guests, in the same place and with all the details identically arranged. She also pointed out that she did not understand why they were repeating the wedding again.

As the symptoms worsened and the pathological Déjà Vu spread its influence into all areas of Louis' life, a tendency towards paranoid thoughts and persecutory 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 he reacted violently to normal, everyday actions.

Louis was about 35 years old when he entered the Maison de Santé in the French commune 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 first come into contact with an unfamiliar person in a normal situation behave. Right after that, Louis' expression became much more friendly and familiar.

I recognize you now, 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 are asking me now, and I gave you the same answers. You are very good at acting surprised, but you can stop now.

Louis thought he had already been to the Vanves sanatorium.. He had recognized the grounds on which it is located, its facilities, and at that time also the people who worked there. Despite Arnaud's denial that all this had happened in the past, it did not seem to convince Louis. Shortly thereafter, 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.

Are you sure it is pathological Déjà Vu?

Although the symptoms experienced by Louis are closely related to the way in which 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 is rather 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 we take for granted.