Sarah Clancy

This chapter examines the conditions under which traumatic events are remembered or forgotten, focusing on the frequently espoused belief that all trauma will be forgotten — a belief presumably based on the notion that too much emotion hurts memory. In particular, it reviews the evidence relevant to the debate about the extent to which trauma victims typically repress and then later recover memories of the traumatic event. In examining the reported evidence — from victims of childhood sexual abuse, concentration-camp survivors, war veterans, and alien “abductees” — the chapter distinguishes among phenomena that have more often collapsed in discussions of repressed memory as well as recovered memory. It argues that the forgetting of traumatic events can arise from quite “normal” phenomena — such as the absence of rehearsal or the initial lack of attention in some aspects of the event — instead of special mechanisms of motivated repression. The chapter also considers the laboratory research on forgetting mechanisms employed by people who have suffered through various types of trauma.

Some psychotherapists believe that adult survivors of childhood sexual abuse (CSA) are characterised by memory deficits for their childhood. Using the Autobiographical Memory Test (AMT), we asked nonabused control participants and participants who reported either continuous, recovered, or repressed memories of CSA to retrieve a specific personal memory in response to either positive or negative cue words from either childhood or adolescence/adulthood. The results indicated that participants who believed they harboured repressed memories of abuse tended to exhibit the greatest difficulty retrieving specific memories from their childhood. Neither posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) nor major depression was related to diminished memory specificity.