Repressed Memories

Among the most interesting ways individuals can deceive themselves is through memory. Though there are countless undisputed ways in which memory fails or becomes distorted, the concept of “repression” has been among the most controversial in modern psychology. On one hand, proponents believe that repression is a mental mechanism that helps individuals deny the reality of true traumatic experiences. On the other hand, critics of the concept of repression argue that efforts to “recover” repressed memories can lead to very rich, seemingly real, false memories for events that never happened. What these opposing views have in common is that both implicate repression in the self-deceptive functions of memory.

The concept of repression gained widespread attention from the writings of Sigmund Freud at the end of the 19th century. Freud argued that memories of traumatic, threatening, or otherwise unacceptable experiences can be repressed into the unconscious, where they are effectively walled off and inaccessible to the conscious mind, in effect, deceiving the repressor to falsely assume that things that did happen actually did not. Nevertheless, Freud argued, the repressed content remains accurately represented in the unconscious mind, and may leak from the unconscious into dreams and into waking life in the form of problematic clinical symptoms. Among the goals of therapy, as envisioned by Freud, was the reintroduction of the repressed content into conscious awareness, where it could be addressed and facilitate improvement of the symptoms.

Freud's theories have been highly influential in the therapeutic community, in which they formed the basis of three widespread assumptions: (1) that memories of traumatic experiences are particularly likely to be repressed; (2) that, while repressed, the memories do not fade but remain unchanged and undistorted for as long as decades; and (3) that they may be recovered unchanged through a variety of common therapeutic techniques. Each of these assumptions has been vigorously contested in a controversy that has come to be known among psychologists as the “memory wars.”