Deja vu is an uncanny feeling of having experienced before
what one is experiencing in the present, while being aware that this is not
true, yet without insight as to why this false recall (illusion) has made an
inroad into one's consciousness.
The doctors too have little to tell us. Their boilerplate explanations that
it is "cognitive uncertainty" caused by one part of the brain not
connecting with another part quite correctly, and, therefore, two sets of
memories are dissonantly getting stimulated, or it is some
kind of temporal or hippocampal lobe epileptoid activity, all sound very
profound but do they really tell anything?
The first explanation is too broad
and since it explains all other neurological and psychiatric disorders as well,
other than giving an aura of punditry, explains nothing. Temporal lobe epilepsy
while it may trigger some stored memory in some sufferers, which usually
unfolds stereotypically, it does not quite give the feeling of deja vu but what
was best summarized by a patient of mine as "Oh man, the shit is happening
again". Furthermore, it does not happen while one is in full possession of
one's mental faculties as in deja vu but in the context of varying degrees of
clouded consciousness.
This patient who developed a pituitary tumor in his mid-twenties, and
because of it psychomotor seizures, his symptoms clearly tell us that no matter
what the learned articles say, Deja vu is a psychological phenomenon whose
etiology must not be looked into the neurological substrate. The seizures would begin with the exact same
sequence of memory generation of being in a house where a conversation is going
on between a few people, none of whom he knows, with a realization that of
course this is fake (illusion) and he declared them to be the aura of the
impending seizure. This would be followed by an intense paranoia of an imminent
attack with the need to protect himself by covering his head with his hands,
the accompanying anxiety so painfully intense that his stomach would churn into
knots. These seizures, which at their zenith, before the tumor was removed,
happened almost two to three times a week and since they followed the same script unvaryingly, he
viewed them as a text book case of deja vu. But a little reflection shows that
while this patient, who is a philosophy major and very intelligent, thought of
these seizures as a classic case of deja vu, they clearly are not. In deja vu
what you are currently experiencing feels like you have experienced before, but
no memory of that past experience emerges, just the (false) feeling of
the current experience having been experienced before. In temporal, or
other cortical, lobe seizure there is an actual emergence of
memories that are unrelated to what you are experiencing in the present,
and the realization of having experienced them before is nothing but a true
recall of having experienced them before for they did occur during previous
seizures. By the way, my patient made sure to tell me that the memory of 'being
in a house and conversing with people he does not know' and 'the intense
paranoia that he felt of being attacked' were not based upon any real memory of
such events ever happening but entirely the product of the seizure caused by
the impingement of the tumor upon the contiguous brain matter.
Now Freud in his article on "The Uncanny" shows us that “the
affect of uncanny" is generated when a repressed memory is
triggered, and its derivatives make their way into consciousness. Not the entire repressed complex
but only its transformed
(distorted) offshoots. Some perceptual element/s common to the
repressed complex and what one is currently experiencing gives the repressed
memory the steppingstones to find representation in the conscious strata of the
mind, with the aim of finding satisfaction for the libidinal impulses embedded
in that repressed memory. The emergence of these derivatives in the perceptual
consciousness gives an eerie feeling of something strange yet something
quite familiar happening and something far more mysterious and
powerful than meets the eye, and a sense of foreboding, if not
outright dread. as if what is happening is something not natural but from some
parallel (paranormal) world.
The feeling of strange yet familiar arises because what is now repressed and
forbidden was once very familiar and lovingly pursued; and even encouraged by
one's parents/caretakers to be indulged in. It is like how if one goes back
after decades of absence to one's elementary school, or the house in which one
grew up, everything looks so hauntingly strange and yet so familiar. The other emotions
- mysterious and powerful - are aroused from a subliminal realization of the
complexity and power of the unconscious mental processes against which our
conscious control is no match. especially if they break through with all their
vehemence. Our fascination with movies where half-man-half-beast like King
Kong, Incredible Hulk, Werewolf, and of natural disasters like the Titanic, Contagion,
Deep Sea, and of insanity itself, are our ode to this might of the unconscious.
The aura of paranormal (supernatural) attached to the uncanny arises from a
subliminal realization that the laws of logic and order that is the norm in the
conscious mind do not operate in the unconscious where primary
process (magical) thinking prevails as it does in the world of dreams,
jokes, witchcraft, sorcery and the afterworld, where very strange things that
defy laws of nature, that take no cognizance of the distance in time and space,
and where one thing easily substitutes for another, can happen by just wishing
them to happen. It is a projection of one's own unconscious world, and
its primary process illogical rules, upon the real world and a
reaction to it which is a mixture of fascination, awe, and fear.
But what are repressed memories? How are they different from other memories?
If by repressed memories we mean those that cannot be retrieved, why would the
brain even make them? Did not mnemic systems evolve so one can use the past as
the template to more efficiently traverse the present? Our inability to
recall them certainly does not arise because they are so old and faded that
they have withered away. For when the repression temporarily lifts, as in
dreams, or after the resolution of a mental symptom (which in essence is a
distorted, condensed, unfathomable part expression of a
repressed complex), they are often vivid and clear. And if they are not
old and withered but blocked memories what is the factor that blocks
them?
Let's begin with the last question. The factor that blocks emergence of any
memory is pain. Pleasurable memories are cherished while painful memories are
shunned. Even a minor success is replayed over and over to fully savor
its delight and to upgrade one's esteem of oneself, and whenever present feels
like insurmountable and future ominous, one harks back to past memories of
triumphs to bolster one's self confidence in facing the current uphill battle.
And as far as pain is concerned the mind is not just averse to putting one's
hand in fire but even of thinking about having put one's hand in fire if done
so in the past.
At this point an objection may be justly raised that like how Rod Stewart's
song goes: “some guys do nothing but complain", at least a minority of
mankind, composed of such guys and gals, must prefer painful over pleasurable
memories as their default mode in remembering things past. The psychology of
why people dredge up painful memories to ruin their day is interesting but on
deeper examination does not contradict the most fundamental law of biology : a
living organism moves away from pain (injury) and moves towards pleasure
(accretion of satisfying objects from outside and excretion of painful ones
from within) and this trend [which by the way was responsible for the
separation of the animal kingdom from the plant through developing the ability
to move towards and away from objects more rapidly] persists in the recording
and recall of the memories of these movements of repulsion and attraction as
well. Rod Stewart's complaining guys may be endlessly recounting the painful
harm done to them but only because the pleasure of milking the victimhood
(secondary gain from drawing concessions from others thorough exhibition of
one's miseries) outweighs the pain (which through repeated recounting and
redoing (embellishments) may hardly be painful anymore).
Coming back to the main thread. So do all painful memories get repressed?
No. While plenty of painful memories exist which the mind rather not think
about, they can still be recalled when it is important to do so (with the ego
willing to tolerate the momentary unpleasantness for long term pleasure)
repressed memories on the other hand are those painful memories that cannot be
recalled despite the person wanting to do so. Ordinary traumatic memories, no
matter how painful, remain accessible. A soldier returning from war
loathes to talk about the mayhem and gore he left behind and actively distracts
his mind from thinking about it, but that does not mean he cannot recall them
if required to do so. In fact, in the beginning, despite his utmost desire to
do the contrary, they dart into his consciousness as intrusive thoughts during
the day and as nightmares in his dreams. This is to
"magically" undo (attempts to erase it by pretending
as if the event never happened, substituting it with wishful imaginary situations
in which one could have been at that time [imaginary alibis]) and redo the
trauma (retrospective attempts to obtain mastery over it) by replaying it over
and over again and embellishing and remodeling the truth to better fit with
one's ideal image of oneself. So painful memories due to
straightforward trauma are unwanted, but not inaccessible.
Repressed memories on the other hand either cannot be recalled at all or
if they do emerge in to the consciousness, it is after a struggle with the
mental forces which want to keep them repressed and unless it is a light
temporary repression (like when one forgets a dinner appointment till the time
of it is long past, or mislays the cell phone, or suddenly cannot recall the
name of the person which he could a few minutes ago) a deeply buried repressed
memory from childhood has to go through considerable distortion (imposed
by ego using such defensive cognitive processes as displacements,
condensation, reversals, ellipsisms, representation through allusions and
ambiguity) so the true nature and intent of what emerges is unfathomable,
and does not quite fit in with the coherent structure of the rest of the
mental activity that one is engaged upon.
Is it because childhood repressed memories are more painful than ordinary
traumatic memories and therefore more strongly buried? No. In fact the
repressed memories once upon a time were not even painful but pleasurable
memories and therefore are constantly striving to enter into consciousness and
have to be repelled back by the efforts of the coherent rational part of the
mind (ego), and while this is accomplished by the generation of pain too, the
pain did not arise from accidental traumas but by the pain programmed into the
human nature as part of its psychosexual developmental process. Human species
psychosexuality goes through several stages before reaching its final shape and
each stage after the initial phase of ascendency undergoes de-escalation to make
room for the next one. And this decline of age-inappropriate sexual expressions
is achieved through the creation of pain. Repression is literally the result of
"growing pains". For repressed memories are memories of sexual
experiences (gratifications) to which pain was added to make them
irretrievable. Even at the risk of redundancy let me restate the phenomenon in
a few more ways since there is so much confusion even among the experts as to
what is the metapsychology of repressed memories. Our psychosexual development
requires that with the attainment of every new milestone the previous ones for
the most part must bow out of action (at least their direct expression) through
getting subjected to repression. Repressed memories originally were pleasurable
to which pain was added later on to block the drives embedded in them from moving
into consciousness and from there to motility to obtain discharge
(satisfaction). And why does this happen? Because the development of sexuality
to its final stage (heterosexual genital contact leading to reproduction) is a
complicated affair. Prior to reaching that stage, earlier phases of
psychosexuality first blossom and then undergo repression. All sprouting of
sexuality from the time one was on mother’s breast to when one is ready to make
love to one's heterosexual partner for reproduction cannot find equal
representation in the act. Most of the sexual strivings have to be pruned out.
Just how the mother was the most ardently loved sexual object during the
Oedipal phase becomes an object of queasy repulsion when thoughts of having sex
with her is imputed to a grown man.
As the human sexuality marches from oral-incorporative to anal-sadistic, to
phallic-exhibitionistic, to genital-altruistic, and from autoerotic (organ
pleasure) to narcissistic to homosexual to heterosexual, each succession
results in much of the previous phases becoming age
inappropriate and subject to repression (with
only their aim-inhibited sublimated expressions continuing to find limited
outlets in social behaviors). The satisfaction of the now dethroned drive which
previously just brought pleasure at its discharge now brings pain more than
pleasure. One part of the mind experiences pleasure while another part pain. It
is this pain that initiates repression. The generation of pain arouses the
feeling of having done something wrong (guilt) for which one is experiencing displeasure.
This guilt (having done something wrong) is connected with the harboring of
temptations to give into forbidden sexual impulses. There is anticipation of
harm for this guilt which is experienced as anxiety. The anxiety initiates a
cascade of events. There is the impulse to withdraw from the entire situation
but since, unlike animals, humans rarely can run away with their feet from
their problems they do the second-best thing which is withdrawal of perceptual-consciousness
from the unpleasurable problem (like the ostrich digging its head in the sand
to avoid the unpleasant perception). This withdrawal of consciousness from
troubled situations and memories is what repression is all about. The impulse
to withdraw initiates other motor behaviors as well. Different scenarios of
making the escape, which though not acted out and mostly remaining in the
unconscious as thoughts, nevertheless cause preparedness for running away,
keeping the muscles in high state of alert and tension. This muscle
tension is compounded by impulses that arise to do the opposite of the
libidinal behaviors (austere and altruistic practices)
as an appeasement to the punishing agency (superego). There is also the
generation of impulses to fight back instead of running away from those (or
rather their psychic representations) who originally made these pleasurable
impulses painful (the tension between the ego and the superego). Generation of
these motor tensions from various directions is subjectively felt as a sense of
oppression, mental and bodily heaviness, body aches and pains, chronic fatigue,
immobility (different shades of catatonia), body posture distortions (hunchback
syndrome), and motor overactivity and visceral secretions from
gastrointestinal, respiratory and other mucosal surfaces (psychosomatic
illnesses). Since our repressed complexes are always being tempted to move
towards motility and satisfaction, we are always suffused with different
degrees of counter motor-tensions and the default status of human beings is
that of mild guilt, [moral] anxiety and subminimal body pain.
From where arises this pain that makes sexually pleasurable behaviors into
painful ones leading to their repression? It is done through upbringing.
Human culture through the agency of parents, teachers and other grownups who
are viewed as parent substitutes, use many methods to generate the repressive
pain: disapproval, criticism, shaming, punishment, including corporal,
deprivation of other sources of pleasures as a punishment for indulging in the
age-inappropriate sexual, threat of withdrawal of parental love and threat of
genital mutilation itself (castration). Also, the later stages of
psychosexuality sends inhibitory impulses to make the previous stages
non-operative. A two-year-old who just recently was putting everything
that was coming its way into the mouth now show little interest in doing so in
favor of tearing them apart and later in preserving and accumulating them as
part of his collections. Similarly, a child of four deeply into exhibiting his
acrobatics feels shame and disgust at his excretion which just a year or so ago
he treasured and refused to part with. A fully grown man who makes a show of
himself as a means to win love (phallic exhibitionism), instead of winning the
desired woman by loving her attributes, provokes embarrassment in the onlookers.
In case where there is seduction of the child, or worse still sexual
molestation and abuse, repressive process takes very twisted and drastic
measures. It is because a premature stimulation of sexuality before the ego has
developed enough to contain it properly, causes it to become inordinately
strong. With the prepubertal child's sexual apparatus not yet capable of
responding genitally, the oral and anal routes of sexual discharge become
overactive, burdening the individual with pathologically strong pregenital
sexuality, an aversion to genital sexuality, and a host of mental illnesses,
primarily anxiety. An
interesting corollary to this is that in some people despite normal upbringing,
and no seduction or molestation, on growing into adulthood, memories emerge of
having been seduced in their infancy, in some as early as immediately after
birth, and worse still that they were brutally sexually abused and it is their
parents and other caretakers, in some cases bizarre parental substitutes like
aliens from outer space, whom they accuse of being the perpetrators.
These false memories are a return of the repressed, and
do have a kernel of truth to them, but with a qualification, actually a major
one: it is an actual return of the repressed memories alright but with so much
distortion that the fantasies (formed from hearing or reading about something
similar happening to others from later periods of life) replace the real
content of what was originally repressed.
At this point it dawns upon us that repressed memories are subjected to
falsification which is not the case with simply traumatic memories. The latter
are embellished, sometime quite extensively, but only in order to show
everything that happened in a light favorable to one's self image. But no
matter how long time back in time it occurred, and how much it was embellished,
the basic outline of the ordinary traumatic memory is not trifled with.
Repressed memories on the other hand may show so much distortion that they
often put the truth upon its head. Having had sexual seduction and intercourse
with aliens alighting from flying saucer may replace the original sexual memory
of being tucked in bed by doting parents. It also now dawns upon us that repression
is a psychodynamic conflict where two forces contend with each other, one
pressing for the right to move towards consciousness, motility and discharge
and other trying to keep it immobile and unrepresented. In
simple traumatic memories there is no such dynamic process and no attempt to
make its content unfathomable. Also, this psychodynamic process fluctuates and
it represses memories differently at different times influenced by the
emotional state of the person. What is repressed at the moment or during the
daytime may not be repressed a little later or in the confines of the bedroom
while making love. Also, what may remain repressed while one is acting as an
individual may not remain so in a group, especially if one is part of a
marauding mob or a soldier in war or a participant in a Roman Orgy. It
also dawns upon us that repression is a much wider phenomenon than just
suppression of memories. Finally, simply traumatic memories fade with time with
the degree of its obliteration is proportional to how long back the trauma
occurred, unlike repressed memory where its recall and freshness depends upon
what is happening in the present which is resonating with it.
Since whatever was once pleasurable cannot be fully extinguished by pain,
the earlier stages of libidinal drives, even after subjection to the societal
and parental disapproval, continue their subterranean existence, continue
to demand satisfaction, though mostly in their non-sexualized (aim-inhibited)
forms. The activities of these non-sexualized aims give individuals
their personality and character and together the human culture. Rewards
are meted out by the parents and society in general for practicing these
aim-inhibited and therefore now ostensibly asexual behaviors, in fact now
subjected to so much transformation and sublimation that they are often
outright hostile to the original sexual intentions. We also now realize that
repression is brought about by now just pain but by rewarding behaviors that
replace the originally sexual behaviors. In fact this rewarding of the
antithetical behaviors may be a more potent force in maintaining the repression
than the memory of the pain that occurred when the behavior was punished. For
whenever one is sexually tempted these contrary moral/good/self-preservatory/purpose
driven behaviors because they were rewarded while sexual were
punished, spring to the forefront. These non-sexual good behaviors become the defensive
wall and the forefront of the personality (ego) that keeps the raw
(untamed) sexual behaviors submerged and unable to see the light of
consciousness and action. By teaching and rewarding these contrary behaviors
(anti-cathexis), the repressed behavior is kept in subordination. Whenever the
repressed behavior is activated by some temptation, instead of it coming to the
consciousness the behavior that opposes it usurps its space. The most drastic
of such anti-cathexis (countermeasures) to keep repressed sexuality from moving
towards action is seen in the disorder of Anorexia Nervosa. Here the desire to
"pig out" on sexuality (oro-genital sexual gratification
(fellatio)/orgiastic fusion with multiple men) is combated by its reversal
(bulimia) and by the rejection of one food item after the another - which
by their association with the oral and anal phases of sexuality produce
disgust - to the point that all libidinal drives (life itself) are
rejected. Every piece of body fat and gain in weight becomes the symbol of the
failure of repression and a reminder of the loss of control over one's
sexuality. Here the repression does not just kill the sexuality but kills the
person itself. But all psychoneurotic symptoms can be conceptualized as a
fusion between repressed impulses that have broken through into consciousness
(albeit in displacement and with their true nature hidden through distortion
obtained by admixing with the memories of non-sexual drives) and the
anti-cathectic counter impulses.
How does stimulation of the repressed complex trigger the anti-cathectic
(repressive) behaviors? The memories of the punishments received in the past
that had enabled the sexual impulses to be repressed are also activated,
generating the affect of pain, a sense of doing something wrong (guilt), and
forebodings of further punishment (anxiety). To ward of this anxiety
(anticipated punishment) the memories of the behaviors that in the past
prevented the punishment and pain for giving into libidinal satisfactions
emerge - the good behaviors that were the opposite of the sexual behavior. And
one starts practicing these good behaviors to quell the anxiety and maintain
the repression. Human civilization arose as a byproduct of this endless
pressure upon the members of its species to keep doing these good deeds to
prevent the instinctual impulses from
breaking into consciousness and obtaining satisfaction. These good deeds, when
closely examined. are behaviors to enable others (parental and once hated
siblings but who one was exhorted to love by the parents) to enjoy pleasures
which one must deny to oneself. It is as my medical school motto says:
"Not to be ministered unto, but to minister". It is a form of apology
(appeasement) for possessing unruly sexual impulses but whose existence even,
ironically, one has no clue due to their subjection to repression. What appears
in consciousness is the need for constant vigilance and a compulsion to be
doing something useful and purposeful (protective measures to prevent this harm
from happening to oneself and to one's dear ones). The 'purpose driven life’, ‘only
a life lived for others is a life worthwhile', all these are mottos concocted
to justify why we are always running like a chicken with its head cutoff to
appease society (which as we grow up becomes the representative of the parents)
to avert punishment and thus control the ever-present anxiety. Human being is
best described not as rational, political, or economical animal but a anxious animal
– Homo Anxietus as a patient of mine once put it. A Chinese proverb sums it:
Dog always looking for food, man always looking for trouble. If there are no
fires to put out, he will start a fire to put it out to get rid of the feeling of
having done something wrong. And this harm he always sees as arising from his
transgressions in his non-sexual conduct, instead of where it truly arises: his
fear of harm for inadvertently relaxing his reins over his sexuality.
Which repressed memories the ego finds most difficult to keep under control?
Undoubtedly the ones arising from the Oedipal Complex. They contain the child's
most powerful sexual and aggressive impulses. And it is these repressed
memories from the Oedipal phase, or rather their fragments, which when they
manage to make into the perceptual apparatus, since they do not fit in with
rest of the what is going on there at that point, are felt as odd piece of mental
activity, and generate the affect of uncanny.
Is Deja vu a variation of the uncanny? Now the whole world of
paranormal fascinates us because of it being uncanny. Attraction towards
ghosts, goblins and witches, misshapen humans and other weird looking anthropomorphized
entities, animate and inanimate, which strike horror in us and give us the
creeps, are at bottom our compulsion to revisit our repressed Oedipal phase.
Movies of haunted houses, twilight zone, even the modern art where body parts
do not go where they should but are weirdly torn off (castrated) and put all
over the canvass, are a magnet for us y because of the theme of castration that
underlies them. They are renewed attempts to repeat our relationship with
the attractive and fearful dimensions of our parents that we experienced during
the Oedipal phase and to master our castration anxiety (fear of loss of love
being the substitution of castration complex in females). One must qualify that
all of it is done in displacement and without a clue to our conscious mind as
to why we are compelled to do it. On being asked why one finds scary bloody
figures so fascinating, all one gets back is “for thrills”, without any insight
(such is the power of the repressive forces) as why nasty horrifying things should
attract alongside the repulsion.
Mutilation, gore, misplacement of body parts, which comprise much of
the artwork of Halloween - coming to think of it all modern art - once again
echo the castration complex. In Halloween we see all variations of the
theme of castration: mutilated and defective scary figures, the dreaded
castration already realized, and also representing the retaliatory castration
of the parents, the fleeing ghosts and other retreating monstrous figures.
Funky, shiny, oversized, loud, colorful, ostentatious, opulent features in
adorning oneself is denial and depiction of castration by reversal and by
multiplication.
Let us see if we have any other support for our inference that fascination
with ghosts and other paranormal things is to redo our repressed Oedipal past.
The Sanskrit (Hindi) word for ghost is bhoot. But bhoot also
means the past. Both concepts have split off from a common Indo-European
word-root and perhaps return of the past is from where the idea of ghosts
developed. But not everything from the past is spooky. It is the return
of the "repressed past" that gives us the creeps. That the fear of
ghosts and witches has an intimate connection with our infantile love for our
parents was driven home to me many decades ago when a niece of mine asked me as
to why she dreams of bhoot and chudails (ghosts
and witches). She dreamt of these unsavory parodies of human form in
haunted mansions. Now this 15-year-old teenager was still very attached
to her parents. She took pride in telling everybody she intends to become a
kindergarten teacher and live with her parents for the rest of her life. Behind
this resolve was filial devotion and never to transfer her libido from them to
strangers. Associations to the dream elements revealed that the ghosts and
spooky creatures were her parents, the haunted mansions - her mother's womb.
Because of her attractive looks she had begun to garner attention from
potential suitors, and it had stimulated her sexuality hitherto in wraps of
Indian virtue which encourages celibacy. And there was guilt too over shifting
her love away from her parents to these new objects. Not her love for her
parents as they were now, which was aim-inhibited and
desexualized but her love for them as she had loved them in the
Oedipal phase with the full measure of eroticism and passion behind it. An
intrapsychic conflict had developed. Oedipal love for her parents wanting to
keep her attached to them contending with the love that wanted to be free of
parental influence and unfettered in loving extra-familial objects with full
erotic fervor. In the daytime she could ignore the beckoning of her parents'
pull to take no interest in others. But in night repression partially
suspended, the parents were haunting her as ghosts and witches to stick to
loving them and not others. The fear of their wrath for taking this
developmental step was transforming them into Halloween look-alike ghosts and
witches instead of how they looked in real life. There is nothing too farfetched
in seeing how once the most beautiful and wonderful looking parents with time turn into
ghosts and witches at least in the dreams. The girl who looked like a doll
when one was passionately in love with her before marriage, turns into the
ugliest looking shrew if the marriage fails and one is dragged through the dirt
of a bitter divorce.
Do I have anything else to support the claim that ghosts, witches and other
paranormal entities are fear of our past grabbing and pulling us back from
life's present concerns?
In rural India, the first diagnosis the villagers will give to someone
amongst them slipping into mental illness is "bewitched" - by which
they mean that some chudail (witch) has put a spell on him to love nothing
other than her (with chudail [witch] being the dreaded
dimension of the mother) - or "possessed" - by which they
mean a bhoot (ghost) has taken over his functioning (the
ghost being the fear of father escalated to demonic proportions. And
there is nothing too radical in viewing mental illnesses as being haunted by
the past. For one way to look at hysterics is to see them as victims of their
reminiscences. Being possessed by "Maata" (mother) was a
frequent occurrence among Hindu housewives, and entering into "Haal",
in which one self-flagellates, identifying oneself with the suffering and death
of Imam Hussain (father substitute) in Shia Muslims, are other examples
of mental illnesses being a return of the past into the present.
I am not much of a Deja vu person. I can recall only one episode of it in my
life. It happened when I was 12 years old, at Raman Maharshi's ashram, in
Tiruvannamalai, Tamilnadu. My mother, like the
lama-in-search-of-the-sacred-stream in Rudyard Kipling's Kim, was always in
search of something; an unquenchable thirst to find that [supernatural] elixir
that would transform everything. And for that end, without ever taking a
break, but never ignoring the mundane aspects of life either, she was always on
the go, from one spiritual endeavor to the next. In this quest she always
initially overestimated the Gurus and other wise men, even conventionally
successful men, convinced that they had found the key to life's secrets and
possessed secret supernatural prowess and then dropped them as hot potatoes on
quickly seeing through them that they were as plagued by petty concerns of life
as rest of us. And the search for enlightenment was not from just the living,
but also from the books of past masters. Her favorite books were. P D
Ouspensky's "In Search of the Miraculous”, G. I Gurdjieff's "All and
Everything", Madame Blavatsky’s “The Secret Doctrine",
Jaishankar Prasad's Kamayeni, Lobsang Rampa's and Marie Corelle's entire
anthology. Bhagwan Rajneesh (Osho) and she were friends for years, when
he was just a lecturer in Philosophy at Robertson College, Jabalpur, where she
was Associate Professor in Hindi and Linguistics. Her broad sweep also
incorporated learning from classic religions, and not for the sake of earning
piety brownies but to make sense of the real values present in them. Her
interpretations of Vedas, Puranas, Upanishads, without any formal training in
Sanskrit, was not just brilliant, but different with every new listener. The
Sikhs of Jabalpur revered her for her commentaries on Guru Granth Sahib.
One day, when she was at the zenith of her intellectual powers and her
search, in her late thirties, on reading Paul Brunton, "In Search of
Secret India", where Raman Maharshi was described as an enlightened one,
she packed our bags and headed 1300 miles away, a three day train journey and a
bus ride, to his ashram, tucked in the very heart of Tamil Nadu.
Mind you, when this happened, the Maharshi was already dead and by
about a dozen years. But, perchance, his spirit was still hovering on this
planet? Maybe his last act here, in which he attained Moksha and now reborn on
another more evolved planet to continue his spiritual journey, was to enlighten
her.
From the bus station we took a tonga. As we approached the
ashram a majestic mountain came upon the horizon. It was breathtaking. How
grand the ashram would be if such a beautiful green mountain was its backdrop.
We eagerly waited for Maharshi's abode to appear which would be perhaps grander
than the exponentially expanding mountain. And then came the
disappointment. If the ultimate answers of life were to be obtained in
those scattered ordinary houses with a central structure where uninspired
devotees were doing their routine, for such was the overall ambiance of that
ashram, God certainly was acting in mysterious ways to show his
magnificence.
Looking at my mother, I wondered if she was experiencing the same
disappointment. She was. And then out of nowhere I had a feeling that I
had been in that place before. Everything looked familiar and I exclaimed,
"This place looks very familiar. It feels as I have been here
before."
My mother immediately took notice of what I had said and from her
expressions I could deduce that she had telepathically joined with me in
thinking what I was thinking. The year was 1963, I was 12 years old, and
Maharshi had died in 1950, could it be possible that his soul has transmigrated
and the child she was carrying in 1950-51, that is me, was his reincarnation.
The deja vu definitely had a motive. It was not due to some cognitive
uncertainty caused by one part of the brain defectively communicating with
another or sudden sprouting of temporal lobe epilepsy, but something happening
in a clear headed child who was so much in tune with his mother's needs that to
cheer up her sagging spirits and of course to draw her obsession with all these
wise men who would give her what she was seeking back to himself as if to tell
her why you run after these men, when your own son is as worthy of your
interest as them; in fact he is as good as the very reincarnation of the
Maharshi.
Was there a repressed element in this experience of deja vu? While not at
all obvious, there is little doubt that behind the feeling that I had
been there in that ashram before there was an element of claim for
Oedipal love. For the deja vu was making a declaration to her to not let your
spirits sag and be disappointed once again, for in this enclave your son once
resided as the Maharshi. It was the emergence of the repressed Oedipal love. For
there was also a very vague subliminal fear as we alighted off the tonga would
my mother find the Maharshi's presence there despite his death, with his spirit
still hovering there and would she be then swept off her feet by it into
enlightenment that she has been so desperately seeking and stay back here
and I will lose her. There was a fear of Oedipal defeat to this new rival
Maharshi (father surrogate). Was there a feeling of uncanny in that experience
of deja vu? There was something uncanny about the idea of the soul of that
great sage after his death making a journey into the womb of someone who was
pregnant at that time and beginning its reincarnation there. Such a thing was
only possible through the magical medium of the paranormal, for in the real
world souls of the dead do not travel 1300 miles and sneak inside a growing
conception of unknown and unrelated person.
While my patients rarely report deja vu and the phenomenon may be more
frequent in movies and songs than in real life, a friend of mine, Xenia,
reported to me that she does experience feelings of deja vu frequently. And in
contrast to finding them uncanny she finds them as warm and fuzzy. They happen
when she is in stress or in a situation where she feels like a fish out of
water and then the feeling of deja vu takes over and she feels warm and
comfortable, the situation no longer alien, and she back in her element.
She insisted that the deja vu in her is the intrusion of womb fantasy, and
done not in dreams where it makes such a great percentage of her dream life,
but brazenly during the waking hours itself. Now sleep itself from one way of
looking is a return of the individual back to the womb. From tiring hustle
bustle of life to a temporary break in to few hours of as-close-to-death as we
can manage. We try to make our sleeping ambiance as close to the intrauterine
existence as we can, excluding all sounds and lights, covering ourselves with
warm comforters (to make it even more intrauterine, insomniacs crave for
weighted ones to simulate the cramped position), curling ourselves into a ball
[fetal position], and still not feeling protected, especially when our life at
that point loaded with worries of the real world, we dream in which we see
ourselves retreating into closed safe places. All through life we, tired of the
alien hostile world, are struggling to reach back into mother's womb, which
once was the only place we knew and hence the most familiar. As Freud on his
treatise on Uncanny states: It often happens that male patients declare that
they feel there is something uncanny about the female genital organs.
This unheimlich [uncanny in German] place, however, is the
entrance to the former heim [home] of all human beings, to the
place where everyone dwelt once upon a time and in the beginning. There is a
humorous saying : 'Love is homesickness'; and whenever a man dreams of a place
or country and says to himself, still in the dream, 'this place is familiar to
me, I have been there before', we may interpret the place as being his mother's
genitals or her body. In this case, too, the unheimlich is
what was once heimisch, home-like, familiar; the prefix 'un'
is the token of repression.
It is interesting the deja vu is far more prevalent in dreams than in real
life. While dreaming we often suddenly realize "Oh, I have been in this
place before or I have dreamt this before." Some people have recurrent
dreams for years and in which as soon as it begins they realize that they have
dreamt this or something similar to it before. A purist may object that this a
phenomenon of the dream world and should not be confused with the deja vu of
waking life which happens while one is in full possession of one's faculties.
But I tend to see this phenomenon of the sleep world as no different than the
deja vu of waking life.
And just like in dreams this assurance to oneself oh I have seen this place
in my previous dreams or I have dreamt this before is to lessen the anxiety
connected with the dream, making it less disturbing by saying don't panic, its
contents are already familiar to you so keep on sleeping and dreaming instead
of waking out of it, the feeling of deja vu occurs to make the person feel
comfortable and less intimidated when in a frightening or strange situation.
What it does is to say that don't panic, don't get too intimidated. You have
already been in this situation before and so you will once again handle it with
flying colors.
A few further corollaries: the pain of nursing past injustices can be
utilized to justify that one's lack of success in life is because other people
harmed and obstructed one thus shifting the blame of failed ambitions from
oneself to others with the pain generated from mulling over the harm done to
them being felt comparatively less painful than the pain from coming to terms
with one's true worth; a painful grievance may be nursed till one's last breath
in the hope of eventually comparatively greater pleasure coming one's way
through revenge (keeping grievance stoked for revenge is what lies behind the
burning ambition of humans and gives rise in languages to such metaphors as
fire in the belly, touched by fire etc.); and wallowing in painful memories may
serve the function of shifting the human need for self-punishment (self-injury/masochism)
arising from the Oedipal phase and other unprocessed traumas, from being acted
out in real life, which is more inimical, to just experiencing it through
invoking painful memories of humiliation and harm one has been subjected to in
the past.
