Cryptomnesia

Quick meaning: Cryptomnesia is a noun meaning (chiefly psychology, uncountable) The phenomenon of the reappearance of a long-forgotten memory as if it were a new experience; (countable) an instance of this. Contrast cryptaesthesia.

Meaning

(chiefly psychology, uncountable) The phenomenon of the reappearance of a long-forgotten memory as if it were a new experience; (countable) an instance of this. Contrast cryptaesthesia.

Example Sentences

How much is cryptamnesia-confabulation, how much frontal-lobe indifference-equalisation, how much some strange schizophrenic disintegration and shattering-flattening?

Apparently lacking the time or patience to reveal a comprehensive system of cryptomnesias in his medium, Fräulein SW, [Carl] Jung strenuously asserts the importance of this unconscious device […]

In dreams, therefore, cryptomnesias may appear, that is, impressions, elements, thoughts, a piece of knowledge that the dreamer once had, which then vanishes completely and cannot be reproduced, until it suddenly reemerges in its original form on some particular occasion.

And although [Sigmund] Freud claimed that others’ ideas were of no use to him unless they came at a time when he was ready for them, he proved enormously susceptible to their influence and even noted his own tendency to ‘cryptamnesia’, by which he ‘unconsciously’ contrived to forget his intellectual debts.

Word Forms

• cryptomnesias
• cryptamnesia

Related Words

Related dictionary entries include cryptamnesia, pseudoreminiscence, mneme, retrocognition, flashback, postcognition.

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