Which of the following terms describes the experience where new events seem familiar?
Exam Question Jul 2011
Exam Question Jul 2011
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
