Repressed Memories In The Twentieth-Century

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Repressed Memories The validity of repressed memories has always been one of the most fueled controversial topics. Repression will always be one psychological concept that haunts everyone. A repressed memory is a condition of amnesia in which memories have either been differentiated from awareness or were subjugated by motivated forgetting. They result from the pushing down of feelings and incidents into the unconscious that causes people anxiety and tension that our conscious mind cannot deal with. These memories are occluded because of their painful and horrendous nature such as sexual abuse. However, a continuous war has been, for a long time, raging between advocates of recovered memories and advocates of false memory syndrome. Therefore, to identify where …show more content…

Studies indicate that people, sometimes, forget about the trauma if it’s extreme. One of the different types of trauma that affects our brains differently is mild trauma, which sometimes intensifies the long-term memory. However, it makes it hard to comprehend why memories for horrific experiences can be forgotten and sealed away. False memories, nonetheless, are moderate traumatic incidents that have been created or blocked. One of the examples of false memories is when a woman charged a doctor of rape. The rape happened when she was preparing for a live interview with him. According to Schacter, a memory expert, she charged the wrong man of raping her due to her confusion with the memory of the interview and that of the rape. (Schacter, 1996, 114). The authentication of these memories is very weak and nothing can really determine their truth. Therefore, many families have been shattered due to the false indictments of sexual