Trauma Memories: Research and Ethics

Assessing the Validity of Recovered Memories

Proponents of recovered memory therapy generally suggest that a history of childhood traumas can affect current behaviors while escaping conscious memory. Such a view holds that highly stressful experiences can be prevented from integrating into conscious memory through either dissociation (the inability to recall important information because of a failure of encoding) or repression (the active process [Page 718]of blocking memories from conscious awareness). Repressed memories and dissociative amnesia of traumatic events are here distinguished from normal processes of forgetting because they suggest that traumatic experiences may still express themselves through distressing symptoms while remaining inaccessible to conscious recollection. It is assumed that symptomatic expressions of traumatic experiences, also called implicit memories, can affect thoughts, behaviors, and actions. Recovered memory therapy thus emphasizes the necessity of retrieving patients' lost history of traumas, particularly through the use of therapeutic techniques such as hypnosis, guided imagery, and dream analyses, to dispel the unwanted effects of implicit memories.

Research demonstrating the validity and rate of recovered memories has employed different methodologies. For instance, retrospective studies have been conducted in which participants were asked whether they had previously suffered from abuse, as well as other questions evaluating the continuity of their memories of traumatic experiences over time. In these studies, a significant proportion of participants reported both past abuses and their forgetting, thus suggesting that traumatic events can be repressed for prolonged periods before reintegrating conscious memory. However, interpretations of such results remain questionable. Participants may indeed be wrong in their assumption that they have been abused, or even in their belief that they have forgotten their abuse. Other forms of research have included prospective studies in which individuals with a demonstrated record of childhood abuse were interviewed in later years under the cover of general health surveys. Such studies intended to determine whether—and to what extent—the abuse would be forgotten in adulthood. But although a sizable number of individuals who participated in such studies failed to mention the abuse, results are again difficult to interpret. The unreported abuse may be attributed to repression or dissociation, but also to participants' conscious decision not to disclose their traumatic experiences to investigators, as well as to normal forgetting, particularly in cases where the abuse was recorded at a very young age. Such methodological limitations on current research prevent psychologists from definitely asserting the validity and rate of recovered memories. General consensus among researchers thus suggests that cases of recovered memories are possible but probably rarer than previously believed.

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