Not all memories can be accessed at will. According to Freudian theory, some that are too disturbing to contemplate can be repressed so that they are inaccessible to the conscious mind. But whether memories ‘recovered’ in therapy are reliable is a matter of debate.
The notion of an unconscious mind full of repressed memories and hidden desires originated in the ideas of Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) early in the 20th century. The concept became hugely popular and went on to dominate Western psychology for more than half a century. Freud based his theories on his observations of hypnotized patients acting out what seemed to be traumatic events of which they had no conscious memory. He suggested that the memories of the events had been repressed – blocked out of awareness and buried in the unconscious mind. The blockade, however, is not entirely effective, so repressed memories may pop up in dreams or intrude into thoughts in a disguised form. Sexual memories and ideas are especially likely to be repressed, so a knife or a stick in a dream, for example, would be held to represent a penis. And unconscious beliefs might be revealed by slips of the tongue – saying, for example, ‘You look lonely tonight instead of ‘you look lovely. Psychoanalytic therapy is largely based on digging up repressed memories so they can be confronted and dealt with consciously.
Freud’s theories spread rapidly, with some followers taking his ideas to the point of absurdity. For example, Budapest analyst Sandor Ferenczi once diagnosed ‘sexual desire for the coachman’ as the cause of a woman’s collapsed ring a drive.
Memories or fantasies?
In the decades that followed, Freudian thinking was gradually replaced in psychology by new approaches to understanding the mind, and today, it is no longer seen as offering scientifically valid insights. However, repression – or something like it – remains a hot topic of debate: can traumatic events, especially childhood sexual abuse, be buried as unconscious memories and then ‘released’ by therapy? Or are ‘recovered memories’ mere fantasies created by the brain or implanted by overzealous therapists?
The evidence is conflicting. Surveys of children who have undergone a traumatic experience intact suggest that they remember the events only too well. On the other hand, certain emotional memories may indeed be blocked out: a recent study of 129 women who had suffered well-documented abuse as children found that 16 percent of them seemed to have forgotten all about it – even though it must have affected them dreadfully at the time. One in three murderers claims to have no memory of committing the crime. And ‘forgotten’ emotional memories sometimes resurface after damage to the prefrontal cortex – the brain area that does the things attributed by Freud to the ‘super-ego,’ or the mind’s censor.
There are also cases of forgotten traumas being triggered into consciousness by association. A woman who had been raped on a brick path (a reliable witness recounted the incident) remembered nothing about it for weeks after the attack. But one day, she saw some bricks of the same type – and the whole thing came flooding back.
True Or False?
However, there is also evidence that false memories are remarkably easy to create. In one experiment, researchers subjected a group of adults to ‘therapy’ in which their dreams were interpreted as representing an event where they had either been bullied or lost as toddlers. Two weeks later, half of them claimed that such an event had actually happened. No one in the ‘control’ group (which did not have therapy) made any such claim. Brain scans have shown that a true recollection activates a different area of the brain from one that is false. So, eventually, the truth of ‘recovered memory’ cases may be determined not by consulting the memories of the people concerned but by watching those memories being accessed.
Rose – Tinted Memories
Write down as many events as you can recall from the first eight years of your life. Don’t stop until you have come up with at least 20. Then, sort them into three categories: pleasant, neutral, and nasty, and count up how many there are in each.
Most people list about 50 percent pleasant memories, 20 percent neutral, and 30 percent unpleasant. Supporters of the repression theory claim that the preponderance of pleasant over nasty recollections shows that bad memories are repressed. But it may simply be that most of us experience more pleasant events during childhood than unpleasant or neutral ones.
The Snow-Laden Tree
Freud recounted the case of a man who could recite an entire poem, apart from one line describing a snow-laden tree ‘covered in the white sheet,’ which he could never recall. To discover why Freud asked his patient to free-associate (talk freely without forethought) around the phrase from the poem.
The man said it reminded him of a shroud, which he then associated with his brother, who had died of an inherited disease. Eventually, this led to the unearthing of the man’s repressed belief that he might die of the same thing.
