Which of the following is not a paramnesia?
Paramnesia
The term paramnesia was coined by Emil Kraepelin to describe qualitative disorders in memory where fantasy and reality are confused.
The following table lists the various paramnesias.
| Paramnesia | Description |
|---|---|
| Déjà vu | The experience of feeling that one has witnessed or experienced a new situation before |
| Jamais vu | The experience of being unfamiliar with a person or situation that is actually very familiar |
| Confabulation | The unconscious filling in of gaps in the memory by events which never took place |
| Reduplicative paramnesia | The delusion that a place has been duplicated. It comes in three forms (Politis, 2012):
|
| Retrospective falsification | The process of distorting a memory |
| Cryptomnesia | This is characterised by having a thought without realising you have had the thought before (for example, some plagiarists claim they are unaware that they were recounting other peoples work) |
A note on terminology:
The subjective belief that a place has been duplicated, existing in at least two locations simultaneously, is termed reduplicative paramnesia.
Reduplicative paramnesia is a subset of the delusional misidentification syndromes (DMS) which include (Carolina, 2014):
- Capgras delusion
- The Fregoli delusion
- Intermetamorphosis
- Subjective doubles
- Reduplicative paramnesia
- Mirrored self
- Delusional companions
- Clonal pluralisation of the self
Carolina (2014) The Masks of Identities: Whos Who? Delusional Misidentification Syndromes. J Am Acad Psychiatry Law 42:369-78, 2014.
Politis (2012) Reduplicative Paramnesia: A Review. Psychopathology 2012;45:337-343
