Repressed memory

Repressed memory is a controversial and largely discredited psychiatric phenomenon characterized by an inability to recall autobiographical information, usually of a traumatic or stressful nature. The concept originated in psychoanalytic theory, where repression is understood as a defense mechanism that excludes painful experiences and unacceptable impulses from consciousness. Repressed memory is presently considered largely unsupported by research. Sigmund Freud initially claimed the memories of historical childhood trauma could be repressed while still unconsciously influencing present behavior and emotional responses. He later revised this belief. While the concept of repressed memories persisted through much of the 1990s, insufficient support exists to conclude that memories can become inconspicuously hidden in a way that is distinct from forgetting. Historically, some psychoanalysts provided therapy based on the belief that alleged repressed memories could be recovered. However, rather than promoting the recovery of a real repressed memory, such attempts could result in the creation of entirely false memories. Subsequent accusations based on such "recovered memories" led to substantial harm to persons implicated as perpetrators, sometimes resulting in false convictions and years' incarceration.…

Repressed memory is a controversial and largely discredited psychiatric phenomenon characterized by an inability to recall autobiographical information, usually of a traumatic or stressful nature. The concept originated in psychoanalytic theory, where repression is understood as a defense mechanism that excludes painful experiences and unacceptable impulses from consciousness. Repressed memory is presently considered largely unsupported by research. Sigmund Freud initially claimed the memories of historical childhood trauma could be repressed while still unconsciously influencing present behavior and emotional responses. He later revised this belief. While the concept of repressed memories persisted through much of the 1990s, insufficient support exists to conclude that memories can become inconspicuously hidden in a way that is distinct from forgetting. Historically, some psychoanalysts provided therapy based on the belief that alleged repressed memories could be recovered. However, rather than promoting the recovery of a real repressed memory, such attempts could result in the creation of entirely false memories. Subsequent accusations based on such "recovered memories" led to substantial harm to persons implicated as perpetrators, sometimes resulting in false convictions and years' incarceration. Out of lack of evidence for the concept of repressed and recovered memories, mainstream clinical psychologists have stopped using these terms. The clinical psychologist Richard McNally stated, "The notion that traumatic events can be repressed and later recovered is the most pernicious bit of folklore ever to infect psychology and psychiatry. It has provided the theoretical basis for 'recovered memory therapy'—the worst catastrophe to befall the mental health field since the lobotomy era." ===Authenticity=== Memories can be accurate, but they are not always accurate. For example, eyewitness testimony even of relatively recent dramatic events is notoriously unreliable. Memories of events are a mix of fact overlaid with emotions, mingled with interpretation and "filled in" with imaginings. Skepticism regarding the validity of a memory as factual detail is warranted. For example, one study where victims of documented child abuse were reinterviewed many years later as adults, 38% of the women denied any memory of the abuse. Various manipulations are considered to be able to implant false memories (sometimes called "pseudomemories"). Psychologist Elizabeth Loftus has noted that some of the techniques that some therapists use in order to supposedly help the patients recover memories of early trauma (including such techniques as age regression, guided visualization, trance writing, dream work, body work, and hypnosis) are particularly likely to contribute to the creation of false or pseudo memories. Such therapy-created memories can be quite compelling for those who develop them, and can include details that make them seem credible to others. In a now classic experiment by Loftus (widely known as the "Lost in the Mall" study), participants were given a booklet containing three accounts of real childhood events written by family members and a fourth account of a wholly fictitious event of being lost in a shopping mall. A quarter of the subjects reported remembering the fictitious event, and elaborated on it with extensive circumstantial detail. This experiment inspired many others, and in one of these, Porter et al. convinced about half of the participants that they had survived a vicious animal attack in childhood. Critics of these experimental studies have questioned whether their findings generalize to memories for real-world trauma or to what occurs in psychotherapeutic contexts. However, when memories are "recovered" after long periods of amnesia, particularly when extraordinary means were used to secure the recovery of memory, it is now widely (but not universally) accepted that the memories have a high likelihood of being false, i.e. "memories" of incidents that had not actually occurred. It is thus recognised by professional organizations that a risk of implanting false memories is associated with some similar types of therapy. The American Psychological Association advises: "...most leaders in the field agree that although it is a rare occurrence, a memory of early childhood abuse that has been forgotten can be remembered later; however, these leaders also agree that it is possible to construct convincing pseudomemories for events that never occurred." Not all therapists agree that false memories are a major risk of psychotherapy and they argue that this idea overstates the data and is untested. Several studies have reported high percentages of the corroboration of recovered memories, and some authors have claimed that among skeptics of idea of recovered memory there is a "tendency to conceal or omit evidence of corroboration" of recovered memories. A difficult issue for the field is that there is no evidence that reliable discriminations can be made between true and false memories. Some believe that memories "recovered" under hypnosis are particularly likely to be false. According to The Council on Scientific Affairs for the American Medical Association, recollections obtained during hypnosis can involve confabulations and pseudomemories and appear to be less reliable than nonhypnotic recall. Brown et al. estimate that 3 to 5% of laboratory subjects are vulnerable to post-event misinformation suggestions. They state that 5–8% of the general population is the range of high-hypnotizability. Twenty-five percent of those in this range are vulnerable to suggestion of pseudomemories for peripheral details, which can rise to 80% with a combination of other social influence factors. They conclude that the rates of memory errors run 0–5% in adult studies, 3–5% in children's studies and that the rates of false allegations of child abuse allegations run 4–8% in the general population. ===Mechanisms=== Those who argue in favor of the validity of the phenomenon of repressed memory have identified three mechanisms of normal memory that may explain how memory repression may occur: retrieval inhibition, motivated forgetting, and state-dependent remembering. ====Retrieval inhibition==== Retrieval inhibition refers to a memory phenomenon where remembering some information causes forgetting of other information. Anderson and Green have argued that for a linkage between this phenomenon and memory repression; according to this view, the simple decision to not think about a traumatic event, coupled with active remembering of other related experiences (or less traumatic elements of the traumatic experience) may make memories for the traumatic experience itself less accessible to conscious awareness. However, two problems with this viewpoint have been raised: (1) the evidence for the basic phenomenon itself has not consistently replicated, and (2) the phenomenon does not meet all criteria that must be met to support memory repression theory, particularly the lack of evidence that this form of forgetting is particularly likely to occur in the case of traumatic experiences. ====Motivated forgetting==== The motivated forgetting phenomenon, which is also sometimes referred to as intentional or directed forgetting, refers to forgetting which is initiated by a conscious goal to forget particular information. In the classic intentional forgetting paradigm, participants are shown a list of words, but are instructed to remember certain words while forgetting others. Later, when tested on their memory for all of the words, recall and recognition is typically worse for the deliberately forgotten words. A problem for viewing motivated forgetting as a mechanism of memory repression is that there is no evidence that the intentionally forgotten information becomes, first, inaccessible and then, later, retrievable (as required by memory repression theory). ====State-dependent remembering==== The term state-dependent remembering refers to the evidence that memory retrieval is most efficient when an individual is in the same state of consciousness as they were when the memory was formed. Based upon her research with rats, Radulovic has argued that memories for highly stressful traumatic experiences may be stored in different neural networks than is the case with memories for non-stressful experiences, and that memories for the stressful experiences may then be inaccessible until the organism's brain is in a neurological state similar to the one that occurred when the stressful experience first occurred. At present, however, there is no evidence that what Radulovic found with rats occurs in the memory systems of humans, and it is not clear that human memories for traumatic experiences are typically "recovered" by placing the individual back in the mental state that was experienced during the original trauma. ===Amnesia=== Amnesia is partial or complete loss of memory that goes beyond mere forgetting. Often it is temporary and involves only part of a person's experience. Amnesia is often caused by an injury to the brain, for instance after a blow to the head, and sometimes by psychological trauma. Anterograde amnesia is a failure to remember new experiences that occur after damage to the brain; retrograde amnesia is the loss of memories of events that occurred before a trauma or injury. Dissociative amnesia is defined in the DSM-5 as the "inability to recall autobiographical information" that is (a) "traumatic or stressful in nature", (b) "inconsistent with ordinary forgetting", (c) "successfully stored", (d) involves a period of time when the patient is unable to recall the experience, (e) is not caused by a substance or neurological condition, and (f) is "always potentially reversible". McNally and others have noted that this definition is essentially the same as the defining characteristics of memory repression, and that all of the reasons for questioning the reality of memory repression apply equally well to claims regarding dissociative amnesia. ===Effects of trauma on memory=== The essence of the theory of memory repression is that it is memories for traumatic experiences that are particularly likely to become unavailable to conscious awareness, even while continuing to exist at an unconscious level. A prominent more specific theory of memory repression, "Betrayal Trauma Theory", proposes that memories for childhood abuse are the most likely to be repressed because of the intense emotional trauma produced by being abused by someone the child is dependent on for emotional and physical support; in such situations, according to this theory, dissociative amnesia is an adaptive response because it permits a relationship with the powerful abuser (whom the child is dependent upon) to continue in some form. Psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk divided the effects of traumas on memory functions into four sets: Traumatic amnesia; this involves the loss of memories of traumatic experiences. The younger the subject and the longer the traumatic event is, the greater the chance of significant amnesia. He stated that subsequent retrieval of memories after traumatic amnesia is well documented in the literature, with documented examples following natural disasters and accidents, in combat soldiers, in victims of kidnapping, torture and concentration camp experiences, in victims of physical and sexual abuse, and in people who have committed murder. Global memory impairment; this makes it difficult for subjects to construct an accurate account of their present and past history. "The combination of lack of autobiographical memory, continued dissociation and of meaning schemes that include victimization, helplessness and betrayal, is likely to make these individuals vulnerable to suggestion and to the construction of explanations for their trauma-related affects that may bear little relationship to the actual realities of their lives" Dissociative processes; this refers to memories being stored as fragments and not as unitary wholes. Traumatic memories' sensorimotor organization. Not being able to integrate traumatic memories seems to be linked to posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). According to van der Kolk, memories of highly significant events are usually accurate and stable over time; aspects of traumatic experiences appear to get stuck in the mind, unaltered by time passing or experiences that may follow. The imprints of traumatic experiences appear to be different from those of nontraumatic events, perhaps because of alterations in attentional focusing or the fact that extreme emotional arousal interferes with memory. van der Kolk and Fisler's hypothesis is that under extreme stress, the memory categorization system based in the hippocampus fails, with these memories kept as emotional and sensory states. When these traces are remembered and put into a personal narrative, they are subject to being condensed, contaminated and embellished upon. A significant problem for trauma theories of memory repression is the lack of evidence with humans that failures of recall of traumatic experiences result from anything other than normal processes of memory that apply equally well to memories for traumatic and non-traumatic events. In addition, it is clear that, rather than being pushed out of consciousness, the difficulty with traumatic memories for most people is their inability to forget the traumatic event and the tendency for memories of the traumatic experience to intrude upon consciousness in problematic ways. Evidence from psychological research suggests that most traumatic memories are well remembered over long periods of time. Autobiographical memories appraised as highly negative are remembered with a high degree of accuracy and detail. This observation is in line with psychological understanding of human memory, which explains that highly salient and distinctive events—common characteristics of negative traumatic experiences—are remembered well. When experiencing highly emotional, stressful events, physiological and neurological responses, such as those involving the limbic system, specifically the amygdala and hippocampus, lead to more consolidated memories. Evidence shows that stress enhances memory for aspects and details directly related to the stressful event. Furthermore, behavioural and cognitive memory-enhancing responses, such as rehearsing or revisiting a memory in one's mind are also more likely when memories are highly emotional. When compared to positive events, memory for negative, traumatic experiences are more accurate, coherent, vivid, and detailed, and this trend persists over time. This sample of what is a vast body of evidence calls into question how it is possible that traumatic memories, which are typically remembered exceptionally well, might also be associated with patterns of extreme forgetting. The high quality remembering for traumatic events is not just a lab-based finding but has also been observed in real-life experiences, such as among survivors of child sexual abuse and war-related atrocities. For example, researchers who studied memory accuracy in child sexual abuse survivors 12 to 21 years after the event(s) ended found that the severity of posttraumatic stress disorder was positively correlated with the degree of memory accuracy. Further, all persons who identified the child sexual abuse as the most traumatic event of their life, displayed highly accurate memory for the event. Similarly, in a study of World War II survivors, researchers found that participants who scored higher on posttraumatic stress reactions had war memories that were more coherent, personally consequential, and more rehearsed. The researchers concluded that highly distressing events can lead to subjectively clearer memories that are highly accessible. ==Summary== The Working Group on Investigation of Memories of Child Abuse of the American Psychological Association reached five key conclusions:

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