ept of repression. It was the mechanism of repression that served to explain how traumatic events in childhood served to cause the individual problems long into adulthood. By hypothesizing that a mechanism existed in which memories of events were deposited wholly in the unconscious, Freud both explained, and justified, an analytic technique that concentrated on retrieving many of those memories, or at least the affect associated with them.
The problem with all of Freud's work, as with the concept of repressed memory in general, is that it is difficult to "prove" in any scientific sense. Even the concept of an unconscious has been critiqued as creating an imaginary construct. The "proof" that Freud and others elicited is not generally accepted as credible in terms of hard science, because it is not tangible, easily quantifiable, or immediately replicable. In addition, much of the contents of repressed memory that Freud utilized in establishing and bolstering his theory was obtained under pressure, or suggest
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