Repressed memories, on the other hand, are those you unconsciously forget. These memories generally involve some kind of trauma or a deeply distressing event. Maury Joseph , a clinical psychologist in Washington, D. It sounds simple enough, but the concept of memory repression is a controversial one that experts have long debated. The idea of memory repression dates back to Sigmund Freud in the late s.
He began developing the theory after his teacher, Dr. Joseph Breuer, told him about a patient, Anna O. She experienced many unexplained symptoms. During treatment for these symptoms, she started remembering upsetting events from the past she previously had no memory of.
After regaining these memories and talking about them, her symptoms began to improve. Freud believed that memory repression served as a defense mechanism against traumatic events. Some mental health professionals believe the brain can repress memories and offer therapy to help people recover hidden memories.
But the majority of practicing psychologists, researchers, and other experts in the field question the whole concept of repressed memories. Despite the controversy surrounding repressed memories, some people offer repressed memory therapy.
Practitioners often use hypnosis , guided imagery, or age regression techniques to help people access memories. Such disbelief is based on a body of research that shows memory is not dependable and that simple manipulation in the lab can make people believe they have had encountered something that never occurred. A number of prominent cases of recovered child abuse memory have turned out to be untruthful, stimulated by overenthusiastic therapists.
Psychotherapists specializing in treating adults who are survivors of childhood trauma contend that lab experiments are not ruling out the probability that some delayed memories adults are recalling are factual. Trauma therapists proclaim that abuse encountered early in life can overpower the central nervous system, leading children to split off a hurtful memory from conscious awareness.
They maintain that such a psychological defense mechanism, also called ' dissociative amnesia ,' turns up regularly in the patients they encounter. Tensions between the two positions have frequently been trapped as an argument between hard-core scientists on the fake or false-memory side and therapists who are in clinical practice on the delayed-memory side. Nevertheless, clinicians who do research as well, have been publishing peer-reviewed investigations of dissociative amnesia in leading journals for tens of years already.
Milissa Kaufman is senior author of the new MRI study and head of the dissociative disorders and trauma research program at McLean Hospital, a teaching hospital affiliated with Harvard Medical School. She notes that, as with earlier MRI studies of trauma survivors, this one shows that there is a neurological basis for dissociative symptoms such as amnesia. The condition has been backed up not just by psychiatric case studies but by dozens of studies involving victims of child abuse, natural disaster, torture, rape, kidnapping, wartime violence and other trauma.
For example, two decades ago psychiatrist James Chu, then director of the trauma and dissociative disorders program at McLean Hospital, published a study involving dozens of women receiving in-patient treatment who had experienced childhood abuse.
A majority of the women reported previously having partial or complete amnesia of these events , which they typically remembered not in a therapy session but while at home alone or with family or friends. False-memory proponents have warned that the use of leading questions by investigators might seed an untrue recollection. As psychiatrist Michael I.
MRI studies conducted over the past two decades have found that PTSD patients with dissociative amnesia exhibit reduced activity in the amygdala—a brain region that controls the processing of emotion—and increased activity in the prefrontal cortex, which controls planning, focus and other executive functioning skills.
In contrast, PTSD patients who report no lapse in their memories of trauma exhibit increased activity in the amygdala and reduced activity in the prefrontal cortex. Children may try to detach from abuse to avoid intolerable emotional pain, which can result in forgetting an experience for many years, she maintains.
False-memory researchers remain skeptical of the brain-imaging studies. Henry Otgaar, a professor of legal psychology at Maastricht University in the Netherlands, who has co-authored more than academic publications on false-memory research and who often serves as an expert witness for defendants in abuse cases, maintains that intact autobiographical memories are rarely—if ever—repressed.
But only in the past 10 years have scientific studies demonstrated a connection between childhood trauma and amnesia. Most scientists agree that memories from infancy and early childhood—under the age of two or three—are unlikely to be remembered.
Research shows that many adults who remember being sexually abused as children experienced a period when they did not remember the abuse. Scientists also have studied child victims at the time of a documented traumatic event, such as sexual abuse, and then measured how often the victims forget these events as they become adults.
They discovered that some people do forget the traumatic experiences they had in childhood, even though it was established fact that the traumatic events occurred. At the time of a traumatic event, the mind makes many associations with the feelings, sights, sounds, smells, taste and touch connected with the trauma. Later, similar sensations may trigger a memory of the event. While some people first remember past traumatic events during therapy, most people begin having traumatic memories outside therapy.
A variety of experiences can trigger the recall. Reading stories about other people's trauma, watching television programs that depict traumatic events similar to the viewer's past experience, experiencing a disturbing event in the present, or sitting down with family and reminiscing about a terrible shared episode—for some people, these kinds of experiences can open the floodgates of frightful and horrible memories.
Scientists believe that recovered memories—including recovered memories of childhood trauma—are not always accurate. When people remember childhood trauma and later say their memory was wrong, there is no way to know which memory was accurate, the one that claims the trauma happened or the one that claims it did not.
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