Repressed Memories are not a Fiction
Repressed memories are a psychological fiction and a legal boondoggle Traumatic life events such as childhood physical or sexual abuse can be overwhelming and extremely difficult to grasp. ... Perhaps because you do not want to think about the experience, or perhaps because it is very traumatizing to you, you put the entire situation out of your mind. ... At 3 years old, one is not quite old enough to know something like this is implicitly wrong, but feelings of shame, guilt, fear and anger may emerge (e. ... In defense of recovered factual memories, I will first discuss several proposed reasons for this “forgetting” of traumatic events. I will then refute claims that repressed memories are a result of therapeutic intervention and express my worry that such claims are being sensationalized and exaggerated at the expense of people who are suffering with abusive pasts . ... Repression or “motivated forgetting” involves putting away memories that one wishes to forget. ... It is much easier not to deal with disturbing thoughts than to deal with them. Another possible explanation for recovered memories after much of a time lapse may be dissociation. The dissociative state has been conceptualized as an altered state of consciousness in which ordinary perceptual, cognitive or motor functioning is impaired and when ordinary cognitive elements are not integrated. ... This explanation may be more the case for single episode traumas (and not for continuous abuse). ... It has been shown that memories can be recovered by exposure to certain cues in the environment or in conversation. ... Four types of dissociative (or hysterical) amnesia have been described, but systematized amnesia, which affects memories concerning specific and related past events (such as all memories of a particular person or series of events) is particularly relevant to the recovered memory controversy. ... It has also been shown that even though small errors may occur in the memory with time, inaccuracies in tramatic memories are more likely to be in peripheral details than central details. ... Several studies suggest that memories can be created simply by suggestion. ... However, these studies that seem to “implant memories” provide no evidence against factual recovered memories of abuse because they all “involve memory for artificial, inocuous, non-memorable events” (Lindsay & Reid, p.