Psychological Repression - Related Concepts: Repressed Memories

Related Concepts: Repressed Memories

One of the issues Freud struggled with was the status of the childhood "memories" recovered in his therapy from repression. He concluded that 'these scenes from infancy are not always true. Indeed, they are not true in the majority of cases, and in a few of them they are the direct opposite of the historical truth'. Controversy arose in the late 20th century about the status of such "recovered memories", particularly of child abuse, with many claiming that Freud had been wrong to ignore the reality of such recovered memories.

While accepting 'the realities of child abuse', Elaine Showalter considered it important that one 'distinguishes between abuse remembered all along, abuse spontaneously remembered, abuse recovered in therapy, and abuse suggested in therapy'. Given that psychologists, such as Elizabeth Loftus, have shown that it is possible to implant false memories in individuals, it is possible to 'come to doubt the validity of therapeutically recovered memories of sexual abuse... confabulations'. Many however continue to give them evidential weight.

There is related debate about the very possibility of the repression of psychological trauma. While some evidence suggests that 'adults who have been through overwhelming trauma can suffer a psychic numbing, blocking out memory of or feeling about the catastrophe', it appears that the trauma more often strengthens memories due to heightened emotional or physical sensations. (However these sensations may also cause distortions, as human memory in general is filtered both by layers of perception, and by 'appropriate mental schema...spatio-temporal schemata').

Because of ethical and methodological reasons—for example, a researcher cannot put an experimental group of people through a traumatic experience, and one could not prospectively secure a trauma-free control group, in essence—the information about repression that experimental research can provide is especially limited, despite claims of psychologists and psychiatrists about repressed memory. However, the ignoring (rather than suppression) of information chosen for consideration in the present or future - because it is viewed as aversive - has a powerful relationship to what will be drawn out of the unconscious to be made available for honest, conscious deliberation..