Do you believe in repressed memories?
Wikipedia defines “repressed memory” as “a theoretical concept used to describe a significant memory, usually of a traumatic nature, that has become unavailable for recall…in which a subject blocks out painful or traumatic times in one’s life. This is not the same as amnesia, which is a term for any instance in which memories are either not stored in the first place (such as with traumatic head injuries when short term memory does not transfer to long term memory) or forgotten.”
Beginning in the early 1990s, a litany of court cases were brought to trial based on evidence based (in some cases exclusively) on repressed memories. In 1991, George Franklin was convicted of murder based solely on his daughter’s eyewitness testimony. She claimed to have repressed the memory of watching her father rape and murder her childhood friend for about twenty years and then recovered it upon entering therapy in her late 20s.
Following this trial, in thousands of civil cases (and later criminal cases), family members were accused of childhood sexual abuse and bizarre, horrific Satanic ritual abuse that the plaintiff claimed to have had absolutely no memory of until many years years later.
Since then, organizations such as the False Memory Syndrome Foundation have arisen, arguing that these repressed memories are not in fact repressed memories for real events, but are created by the power of suggestion, mostly by questionable therapeutic techniques.
No scientific evidence corroborates the existence of these repressed memories, and even its strongest proponents agree that there is no way to distinguish between an allegedly real repressed memory versus an imagined memory created by the power of suggestion. The idea of a repressed memory is unsupported by neuroscientists’ current understanding of memory as a psychological or physiological construct.
Do you have any experience with repressed memory? Based on the evidence, do you think these lawsuits have merit? Do you think there’s evidence that repressed memories are a real phenomenon, or do you think they’re created by the power of suggestion?
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I think it happens on both levels. Real suppressed memories and the power of suggestion. I had something repressed but not sure if it was repressed or chemically repressed over time. It was quite the eye opener to find out what happened and how I survived it. But I don’t think it should be used as evidence in a court case because it is possible that is was not so. If however the law can support the memory with real evidence then it should be looked at. For instance the body of the little girl and where this took place. If the law found physical evidence based on the daughters memories then I would say the memories were repressed.
I think repressed memories can be real.
For one thing, I have never known any therapists who implant memories into people. That would mean that all of those therapists were unethical.
Also, that the people who were having the memories implanted were completely unaware of that happening.
I think that is even more unlikely.
Sure, I believe in repressed memories. However, I am rather skeptical about the accuracy of the recollection when such memories are re-awakened.
I wouldn’t say the power of suggestion was necessarily those of a therapist but by society itself, friends, neighbors, family etc… But I would not put it past some therapists doing that.
I wouldn’t say there are many therapists who deliberately trigger false memories but it takes a great deal of skill not to suggest inaccurate details. For a non-controversial example, I have a vague recollection of sitting in a high chair in a kitchen but no real image of what the room looked like. If someone said “So, you were sitting in the green kitchen.”, my memory would fill in the color green but they could just as easily have said “yellow” or “blue” to the same effect.
I just think there are reasons that some therapists may want the outcome to go a certain way especially if the therapist worked for the DA and they needed a conviction. Also how they do that would be just as you stated. By putting in suggestions as to what they were experiencing.
It’s a bit of both – there are, I’m sure, practitioners who place certain ideas during therapy.. not maliciously but they, themselves, might be deluded – example: people who get abductee stories out of people and I think some people really have had trauma so horrid that their brain disassociated and represessed memories…and just because science doesn’t have a handle on what the mechnism is yet doesn’t mean it isn’t real.
I believe in repressed memories. I know I have things that have been repressed. I also believe it is possible for people to implant ideas making a person believe something that is a lie. The power of persuasion and manipulation.
I was raped at age 15 by three high school boys while passed out from being drugged. It was reported to the police, and my parents. My mother was extremely sick at the time with MS and was disgusted with me and blamed me as well. Even though the cops were called, nothing was done long story but true. I went through the rest of high school being blamed for the rape and being called a slut.
Somewhere in my 20s I buried this memory. I had so believed and had been told that I deserved what happened, that I just filed it away.
This year, 20 years after the incident, I was watching an episode of a SHO series and one of the characters had an eerily similar situation. It brought me to uncontrollable sobbing and brought up the memory again.
It was upon discovering this memory that I then chose to seek counseling, not the other way around.
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