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By Root 1268 0

men, and it certainly does not follow that all men are Socrates. Yet the recovered-memory movement was based from the very beginning on the logical fallacy that if some women who have been sexually abused later develop depression, eating disorders, and panic attacks, then all women who suffer from depression, eating disorders, and panic attacks must have been sexually abused. Accordingly, many psychodynamic clinicians began pushing their unhappy clients to rummage around in their pasts to find supporting evidence for their theory. But their clients, when first asked, denied that they had been abused. What to do with this dissonant response? The answer came in Freud’s idea that the unconscious actively represses traumatic experiences, particularly those of a sexual nature. That explains it! That explains how Holly Ramona could forget that her father raped her for eleven years.

Once these clinicians had latched on to repression to explain why their clients were not remembering traumatic sexual abuse, you can see why some felt justified, indeed professionally obligated, to do whatever it took to pry that repressed memory out of there. Because the client’s denials are all the more evidence of repression, strong methods are called for. If hypnosis won’t do it, let’s try sodium amytal (“truth serum”), another intervention that simply relaxes a person and increases the chances of false memories.14

Of course, many of us intentionally avoid a painful memory by distracting ourselves or trying not to think about it; and many of us have had the experience of suddenly recalling a painful memory, one we thought long gone, when we are in a situation that evokes it. The situation provides what memory scientists call retrieval cues, familiar signals that reawaken the memory.15

Psychodynamic therapists, however, claim that repression is entirely different from the normal mechanisms of forgetting and recall. They think it explains why a person can forget years and years of traumatic experiences, such as repeated rape. Yet in his meticulous review of the experimental research and the clinical evidence, presented in his book Remembering Trauma, clinical psychologist Richard McNally concluded: “The notion that the mind protects itself by repressing or dissociating memories of trauma, rendering them inaccessible to awareness, is a piece of psychiatric folklore devoid of convincing empirical support.” 16 Overwhelmingly, the evidence shows just the opposite. The problem for most people who have suffered traumatic experiences is not that they forget them but that they cannot forget them: The memories keep intruding.

Thus, people do not repress the memory of being tortured, being in combat, or being the victim of a natural disaster (unless they suffered brain damage at the time), although details of even these horrible experiences are subject to distortion over time, as are all memories. “Truly traumatic events—terrifying, life-threatening experiences—are never forgotten, let alone if they are repeated,” says McNally. “The basic principle is: if the abuse was traumatic at the time it occurred, it is unlikely to be forgotten. If it was forgotten, then it was unlikely to have been traumatic. And even if it was forgotten, there is no evidence that it was blocked, repressed, sealed behind a mental barrier, inaccessible.”

This is obviously disconfirming information for clinicians committed to the belief that people who have been brutalized for years will repress the memory. If they are right, surely Holocaust survivors would be leading candidates for repression. But as far as anyone knows, and as McNally documents, no survivors of the Holocaust have forgotten or repressed what happened to them. Recovered-memory advocates have a response to that evidence, too—they distort it. In one study conducted forty years after the war, survivors of Camp Erika, a Nazi concentration camp, were asked to recall what they had endured there. When their current recollections were compared with depositions they had provided when they were first released, it turned out