Repressed Memory

The Early History of Repressed Memory

There is a clear difference between memories that have simply been forgotten, or are inaccessible to us, and repressed memory as Freud conceived of it. Researchers since Freud have also distinguished between repressed memory in Freudian terms, and psychological forms of amnesia, which include fugue states and post-traumatic stress disorders. Even those who support a concept of psychological forms of amnesia (as distinct from neurological, or brain damage types of amnesia) seem to be suspicious of the Freudian description of the mechanism by which memories are repressed. Thus, for the purposes of this paper, it seems important to distinguish between a concept of repressed memory, or psychological amnesia, and the original Freudian description of the mechanism by which he believed repression to occur. The problem does not seem to be so much whether or not psychological amnesia exists, most researchers seem to support some concept of this. The problem lies in the incidence of such psychological amnesia, th

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lity. Both groups focus on the lack of proof, of hard experimental data, even while they acknowledge that some aspects of Freud's theories are useful and that hardly any of them are demonstrable experimentally. Other Explorations of Repressed Memory This is certainly the case with repressed memory, which most agree is difficult to either prove or disprove. There are several recent studies and individual cases which have been used to explore the concept of repressed memory, although not specifying the mechanism by which this occurs, and this seems to be the best that can be accomplished since human beings cannot be subjected to traumatic conditions in a laboratory setting to see if those memories will then be repressed for decades. At the same time, a very high percentage of psychotherapists currently support the concept of repressed memory and the potential for recovering accurate memories from early childhood. A survey by Michael Yapko of 860 psychotherapists indicated that 40 percent of them believed that early memories are accurately stored and can be retrieved accurately. In addition, approximately 60 percent of this same group thought that if people had little memory of their childhood this indicated the likelihood of
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 3800
Approximate Pages = 15 (250 words per page)

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