Cryptomnesia
noun ·Rare ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 The phenomenon of the reappearance of a long-forgotten memory as if it were a new experience; (countable) an instance of this. Contrast cryptaesthesia. uncountable
"All the witnesses of Mlle. [Hélène] Smith's Hindoo somnambulisms who are of the same opinion on that subject (several refrain from having any) unite in seeing in it a curious phenomenon of cryptomnesia, of reappearances of memories profoundly buried beneath the normal waking state, together with an indeterminate amount of imaginative exaggeration upon the canvas of actual facts. But by this name of cryptomnesia or resurrection of latent memories, two singularly different things are understood."
Example
More examples"All the witnesses of Mlle. [Hélène] Smith's Hindoo somnambulisms who are of the same opinion on that subject (several refrain from having any) unite in seeing in it a curious phenomenon of cryptomnesia, of reappearances of memories profoundly buried beneath the normal waking state, together with an indeterminate amount of imaginative exaggeration upon the canvas of actual facts. But by this name of cryptomnesia or resurrection of latent memories, two singularly different things are understood."
Etymology
From crypto- (prefix meaning ‘hidden’) + (a)mnesia, modelled after French cryptomnésie, which was coined by Swiss psychologist and parapsychologist Théodore Flournoy (1854–1920) in his work Des Indes à la planète Mars (From India to the Planet Mars, 1899 or 1900). The English word was probably first used in the 1900 translation of Flournoy’s work: see the quotation.
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.