Repressed memory is a controversial, and largely scientifically discredited, psychiatric phenomenon which involves an inability to recall autobiographical information, usually of a traumatic or stressful nature.
[1] The concept originated in psychoanalytic theory where repression is understood as a defense mechanism that excludes painful experiences and unacceptable impulses from consciousness.
[1] Sigmund Freud initially claimed the memories of historical childhood trauma could be repressed, while unconsciously influencing present behavior and emotional responding; he later revised this belief.
[9][10][7] Subsequent accusations based on such "recovered memories" led to substantial harm of individuals implicated as perpetrators, sometimes resulting in false convictions and years of incarceration.
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.
[12] One of the studies published in his essay involved a young woman referred to as Anna O., who had been treated by Freud's friend and colleague Josef Breuer.
[10][17][18] Michelle Remembers (1980), a discredited book by Canadian psychiatrist Lawrence Pazder and his wife/former patient Michelle Smith about Smith's fabricated experiences with repressed memories of childhood Satantic rituals and abuse, gained widespread popularity that persisted after debunking,[16] influenced subsequent claims,[19] and received promotion from media including Oprah, Geraldo Rivera, Sally Jesse Raphael, and 20/20.
[17][22] Originally sentenced to life imprisonment, a district court judge overturned the conviction in 1995 based on several trial errors including the unreliability of hypnosis that was used.
George Franklin was released in July 1996 after prosecutors announced they would not retry him, and in 2018, the DNA evidence linked Rodney Lynn Halbower to the Cascio and Baxter murders.
In 1991, People magazine featured Marilyn Van Derbur and Roseanne Barr's experiences with childhood abuse and repressed memory.
[15] The Ramona false memory case in 1994 was another landmark case, where father Gary Ramona successfully sued for malpractice against Western Medical Center in Anaheim, its chief of psychiatry Richard Rose, and therapist Marche Isabella, for implanting false memories of child abuse while treating his daughter Holly for depression and bulimia.
[27] Skepticism and criticism of repressed memory continued to mount through the 1990s, 2000s, and beyond, emphasizing unreliability, false claims, and lack of examples in historical records.
[33] In response to Harrison Pope's 2006 claim that no such examples exist, Ross Cheit, a political scientist at Brown University, cited the case of Nina, a 1786 opera by the French composer Nicolas Dalayrac, in which the heroine, having forgotten that she saw her lover apparently killed in a duel, waits for him daily.
[36] A review by Alan Sheflin and Daniel Brown in 1996 found 25 previous studies of the subject of amnesia of childhood sexual abuse.
[42] On the other hand, in a 1998 editorial in the British Medical Journal Harrison Pope wrote that "on critical examination, the scientific evidence for repression crumbles."
[62] 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.
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.
Psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk[58] divided the effects of traumas on memory functions into four sets: 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.
[74] 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.
[75] 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.
[78] When compared to positive events, memory for negative, traumatic experiences are more accurate, coherent, vivid, and detailed, and this trend persists over time.
[79] 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.
The court overturned the conviction of a man accused of murdering a nine-year-old girl purely based upon the evidence of a 21-year-old repressed memory by a lone witness, who also held a complex personal grudge against the defendant.
[40] On December 16, 2005, the Irish Court of Criminal Appeal issued a certificate confirming a Miscarriage of Justice to a former nun, Nora Wall whose 1999 conviction for child rape was partly based on repressed-memory evidence.