I remember stuff I haven’t thought about in years all the time. The other day I just got reminded of Maggie and the Furoucious Beast. Haven’t watched that show since I was like 4 and no one’s ever talked about it since but I remembered clearly the yellow beast with the red spots. But apparently science says you can’t do that? And the conversation is entirely focused around traumatic events. What am I missing here?
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“Repressed memories” are a concept invented by Freud where traumatic events are forgotten as part of a psychological defense mechanism called repression. This gained a lot of press in the 1980s and ‘90s when people were accused of abusing children based on the “recovered memories” those children in adulthood. The entire concept has been largely discredited and probably does not exist in the way that it was talked about.
Im going to have to ask for clarification for saying science says you cant remember things?
The difference is that the term “repressed memory” applies to a memory that your brain has blocked out. It’s related to trauma, because that’s usually the only reason that your brain would block a memory; it was something harmful to your mental well-being.
Old memories are not “repressed”. They’re just old. They fade into the background of your mind just through lack of use. They haven’t been “purposefully” forgotten the way a repressed memory has been.
I’m not sure where you heard that science says that you can’t do that, though. People suddenly remember old memories all the time.
Repressed memories are memories that cannot be accessed due to trauma (usually). It’s the brain’s way of protecting itself from the trauma. Other memories like those we haven’t accessed in a while are just long-term storage that is reactivated by a trigger of some kind, causing us to access it like accessing a file. It’s not repressed so much as it is just in an old file.
Repressed means too painful to want to recall. Or it disnt make sense to you at the time and your mind couldn’t properly store the info.
Trigger warning: Mention of sexual abuse, no details
This one time on lunch break as a preteen, I was thinking of someone I was sexually interested in and had a flashback of sexual abuse that occured in childhood. When those things happened, I’d forget by the next morning. Then, after remembering as an older child, I walked around with the world around me as a fuzzy and distorted haze for several weeks.
I think “repressed memories” were sensationalized at one point, but are very much rooted in a dissociative defense response. Maybe it isn’t common, but I don’t believe it’s made up. Otherwise DID wouldn’t exist in the DSM
One of those is pseudoscientific BS Freud basically pulled out of his butt to ad-hoc away the fact his fact his patients had no memory of the things his ‘theories’ said they should, and the other is something that can actually happen. The exact mechanics of memories are largely unknown to us for reasons that can be summed up with “neurology is really, really hard” or perhaps “if it were simple enough to be understandable, we’d be too simple to understand it.”
There seem to be some mixed signals in this thread so I’m just going to clarify: Most methods focused on “Recovering repressed memories” are complete nonsense – because being prodded about a memory can make your brain fabricate one – but the brain is actually capable of repressing traumatic memories. It’s called Dissociative Amnesia, and it’s a known, studied and treatable condition whose diagnosis is based on more than just Freud’s vibes-based approach.
This doesn’t directly answer your question, but it does delve into the history and current thinking about repressed memories.
https://www.vox.com/culture/407244/tell-amy-griffin-repressed-memories-real
I didn’t remember my abuse that happened at 8 until I was 22. It wasn’t in counseling, but a series of events that just brought it all back. It was shocking to say the least. And it’s not made up because I confronted my abuser.
I had a major accident that I’m lucky to be alive from. My memory goes from walking along happy as Larry to it being hours later and I’m unable to move.
It’s likely not the same idea you’re going for but I have 0 idea what happened, I’m yet to have a flash back or anything even revisiting the site.
This was 18months ago and I’ve never had any clues or snippets to piece it together.
Not to wade in to the “induced repressed memories” debate, but the typical example is a situation, often in childhood, where in order to survive some trauma your brain manufactured a different story about what happened, and/or came up with some coping mechanism. Then later in life, you still have that alternate story or coping mechanism, but you have no conscious memory of the real story or why you have that mechanism. Then, since your brain is always trying to explain your actions, you come up with some alternative explanation.
For example, there are people who have some behavior, like depression or anxiety or recklessness, that is actually a coping mechanism they learned to survive some childhood trauma. But they don’t have any memory of the trauma, and have constructed some alternative explanation or justification for their behavior. Then in later life, when they try to get over their depression or whatever, they really struggle to do so because they don’t realize that the behavior is not really caused by present events, but by past events. Like, I have anxiety and I think it is because I hate my job and marriage, and I keep working on my job and marriage but get nowhere. But actually my anxiety is because of some childhood abuse or something.
In terms of why this is different from something just haven’t remembered for a long time, often these memories are traumatic, and part of the coping mechanism that was put in place is to forget or obfuscate what actually happened. So it isn’t really that you are just not remembering them, it is that your brain has put up some obstacle to remembering them.
There is so many personalized opinions in this thread that I doubt OP is going to find much that is useful.
OP: of course people can remember things from when they were 4 years old. And nothing in “science” says you can’t.
Simply put, if you can remember something with effort, then it’s not repressed. The classic definition is that an event (usually something traumatic) is defensively forgotten. But, being a memory, it still is accessible. This is not anything controversial, we all know that upsetting events affect our memory of things.
Unless a person responding here says they are a psychologist, I’d take everything with a grain of salt. Better to read about this on Wikipedia.
The concept of repressed memories is something traumatic happens to you, so your brain makes you forget to save you the emotional pain. Often Tiesto childhood trauma.
The issue is that humans are terrible at remembering stuff, and it is super easy for the cops to gaslight you into making up traumatic events that never happened.
One you can use to make up stories about ritual satanic abuse and the other is just normal memory.
I don’t think there’s really a difference when it comes to trauma.
But since – I’m assuming – nothing traumatic happened to you involving a children’s show, your brain has no reason to “hide” that memory from you.
I would recommend watching the MASH finale “Goodby, Farewell, & Amen” for a good representation of this concept in fiction.