News Harvard-associated Psychiatrist Disputes Repressed Memory

[Pietro]

Article from 2008. This psychiatrist disputed the existence of the repressed memory phenomenon based upon the apparent lack of mention of any instances of this in any history or literature before the year 1800.

Interested to know what folks think about his premise and his methodology. I know what I think. ;)
http://harvardmagazine.com/2008/01/repressed-memory.html

 

[Eleanor]

Way too broad conclusion based on inherently flawed body of evidence, I'll bet you can not find any mentions of colorblindness oe dyslexia either, Does that "prove" or even suggest that they didn't exist? Horsefeathers, Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

What do they teach people in schools nowadays?:geek:

 

[therapybankrupt]

No Attention Deficit Dissorder or Tylenol back then either. My EMDR that they believe is an excellent way to deal with trauma. Did bring up many repressed memories some from childhood and others from an abusive marriage. So I say either EMDR is a bunch of crap or Harvard doesn't know what the hell they are talking about!

 

[WillyKat]

There is another name of a Berkeley professor named Richard Ofshe, who repeatedly appeared as an "expert witness" in cases where repressed memory was an issue.

He consistently said that it was therapists that were planting ideas in people's heads. Well guess what? I recoverd my memory five years before I even considered seeing a therapist.

It speaks volumes that these people chose such an unscientific methodology to question the claim of repressed memory.

 

[Kas_Can_Fly]

This truly scares me to my very core, the idea that people don't believe repressed memory, because if that's the case then I'm either far crazier than I'd ever imagined and or a horrible twisted person. I'm hoping neither of which are true. Luckily I know that I have repressed things because some I have been told so by others and I still don't remember them, although not all of it a certainly not the things I wish someone knew happened undeniably. But it still terrifies me that others think this way as I fear disbelief(, invalidation, rejection and imposed isolation) more than anything.

The memories I have recovered so far have all been on my own and without any external input professional or not.

 

[Lucycat]

I don't doubt that repressed memory is real. However I also know that 'false' memories can be instilled by suggestion to susceptible people. I find the whole concept of memory absolutely fascinating.

 

[Deleted member 1860]

I think this is crap.

Someone go quiz him on every second of his day......let's just say June 7, 2005 for example. Oh, he can't remember every second of his day? Geez. The human mind isn't designed to remember EVERYTHING. I don't understand the concept of "you're allowed to forget what color underwear you were wearing last Tuesday but you aren't allowed to *forget* anything more significant". What crap.

Harvard isn't the end all and be all of...well, anything. They've got idiots, too.

 

[Kas_Can_Fly]

Also it doesn't take into consideration dissociative experiences - I couldn't remember why I had a many of the injuries, bruises and pains around the time and even the next day following some abuses, only some ten years later is that beginning to make sense. Something that had always terrified me is that I could remember some things and not others, somehow the things I repressed were less real and I was confused why I couldn't remember them the next day or rest of the week - I seemed to think that repressing something must have taken time, whereas for me in was instant because of the dissociation. As my therapist explained that makes even more sense as not being able to remember immediately would be obvious dissociation during the event - therefore not having a full or any memory of the abuses as I spent and still do spend a lot of my time dissociated.

 

[Pietro]

I'll bet you can not find any mentions of colorblindness oe dyslexia either

Exactly -- I actually thought about that later in the evening. There are many things I can think of that are not mentioned in past times, at the very least because some things weren't even considered remarkable. Amazing that this even got published.

No Attention Deficit Dissorder...

And here's one example. :)

He consistently said that it was therapists that were planting ideas in people's heads.

I don't doubt that repressed memory is real. However I also know that 'false' memories can be instilled by suggestion to susceptible people.

The problem here is "all or nothing" syndrome. Are there instances where this has occurred? Yes, very likely, from what I've read. There are a large number of very poorly trained therapists, out there, who think nothing of mucking around with hypnosis and EMDR on people, while having a poor understanding of mind and neurology. Apparently, though, their poor work has been taken as "the norm", when there is plenty of real scientific literature that supports both the existence of this phenomenon, and appropriate methods of working with it -- ones that do not influence one's perceptions, but allow the patient to come to the memories on their own.

Luckily I know that I have repressed things because some I have been told so by others and I still don't remember them

I have not recovered any specific, concrete memories (I don't think!), but I know that there are things missing in my memory. For example, when I was 3, I apparently pulled a cup of boiling water down on my chest, which scalded me severely. I don't remember the incident at all, but I've been told about it, and have the shadow of some scarring on my chest to prove it. As unscientific as my little anecdote is, it is magnitudes more provable than anything said in this article.

I don't understand the concept of "you're allowed to forget what color underwear you were wearing last Tuesday but you aren't allowed to *forget* anything more significant". What crap.

Good point. :)

Harvard isn't the end all and be all of...well, anything. They've got idiots, too.

Yes, there's competent and incompetent in every field and profession, and, more generally, those who are more curious vs. those who are more rigid. Mostly, though, it's the arrogance and hubris of making such a claim on such a childish premise, from someone who is the head of a psych center affiliated with a major university that has a well-renowned medical program, that's surprising and disconcerting. As Eleanor said, "What do they teach people in schools nowadays?" ;)

 

[Eleanor]

There was a great sixty minutes special report a while ago on eyewitness testimony and memory. The detective (who helped wrongly convict the innocent guy at the heart of the story based on eyewitness testimony) said something that has stuck with me. He said, "I was never taught to treat memory as a crime scene." Just as one might contaminate the evidence at a crime scene, one might contaminate the evidence of memory. It was a "wow" for me.

Here is what all the (serious) memory researchers I have read/know say: Memory is complicated. What exactly and how exactly we remember things is not straightforward. Not at all. Even the technologies we use to "remember" things, like photography are not totally transparent (see Errol Morris's work.)

Clearly people forget things and then recover (or reconstruct) that memory ALL THE TIME. And have done forever. Recovered memories are just a special case of it. And recovered memories of abuse are the sorts of things that are very very likely to "fly under the radar" in human history. How long do you suppose literature that talked about them would last? What would happen to the writers? Seriously, this "research" is just lame.

Colorblindness is actually a good example - there are no mentions of it because no one figured it out until we had a theory of optics that could make sense of what was going on. In the 18th century. No one talks about electricity either. But I suppose that exists.

No literary mentions. So what?

 

[HelenB]

I know for myself that I have found it hard when I have considered things like this and I also had to study false memory syndrome as part of my psychology course for my degree just when a lot of things were coming up for me, as so much of me would like to believe that the things I have remembered have never happened to me, but I know so well from my own experience that this just is not the case. The first thing I remembered which I had shut out, I remembered as a teenager when I was at boarding school when I had a dream and though I really did not want to believe it, I knew it was true. For me this memory I was also able to have confirmed before my mum died as though she had denied it earlier on when we had had been in family counselling, she did actually admit later that it had been true and I always had known it was real from when I dreamt and remembered it.

I think for me this experience has really helped when it has been so hard to accept the reality of other memories which I have had, and made it so much easier to rationally accept the reality of the way my mind had worked, even when that reality has been so hard to accept at times, and even when studies such as this suggest otherwise.
Helen

 

[Candleflames]

As many people pointed out memory is a complex and mysterious thing. I too have remembered as an adult horrible things that happened as a child. Some of these I believe to be strait memories but some I think are more of the have a root in truth but also speak to my fears of what happened. There are also a couple of instances where I remember a combination of two or more events as one. Our brains are not tape recorders that we can rewind and review with clarity but that also means that when damage occurs the footage isn't lost forever. Recovering forgotten memories is definitely possible, we do it all the time, but the longer ago those memories the more delicate the process.

I think this opinion won't be a popular one but here it goes. I actually like that these professors are looking into literature for earlier evidence of this phenomena. Looking for references in ancient literature is exactly one method some researchers are using to prove the existence of PTSD. I think the only thing we can gripe about is the inherent flaw in trying to prove a negative. While this study is far from proving anything, it is an important clue to our development as human beings and hints at further avenues to explore that might give us some insight into repressed memories and the development of human compassion.

There is a passage early on that contradicts the supposed conclusion. The article states that "although many early texts describe ordinary forgetfulness caused by natural biological processes, as well as instances of individuals forgetting happy memories and even their own identities, there were no accounts of an inability to recall a traumatic experience at one point and the subsequent recovery of that memory." This one point has me wonder two things about there definitions as well as their methodologies.

In looking for references did these professors abandon their preconceived notions of how repressed memories work? What if instead of some big to do they are actually a byproduct of normal forgetfulness and so operate under the same biological processes? I know that when I forget something it is often simply me not being there fully in the moment. That is awfully similar to the dissociative states I experience. It's possible that we simply need to demystify the concept of repressed or forgotten memories. It's possible that it isn't that something was soooo terrible that our brains must push it aside but that the individual was not fully present for the experience and therefore it was forgotten. On the opposite end an experience perceive as euphoric would yield similar results and the study did say that forgotten happy memories were normal in their search.

I also take issue with how they define traumatic. Did they use our modern idea of trauma or did they take into account an appropriate historical idea of what experiences would be outside the norm? The word "trauma" itself is a relatively new addition to our language. The ideas of what is harmful and what is to be expected has radically changed over years. It was common to watch loved ones suffer over long periods and die from injuries that ranged from serious to even minor. People were also imprisoned, tortured and executed for many different offenses. Much of these events were public and considered entertainment. Watching any of this now would certainly be traumatic, 500 years ago, not so much. Finding many of these events portrayed as traumatic or even just "bad" in a historical context would be difficult in and of itself.

So a couple of things that excite me about this study. It shows that there is a historical awareness of the malleability of memory. It's possible that when talking about repressed memories that we simply put too much emphasis on the bad. That the negative emphasis has us searching for the process in the wrong areas and that there is way too much dramatic flare when we recover something in modern media. It also shows the development of human compassion could stand to be studied further. How trauma is defined can make or break a study like this. A clear idea of trauma and how it relates to compassion in an historical context is vital for this research to happen. Then researchers could take that and study how the changing definitions of trauma and compassion effects the prevalence of traumatic instances of the day.