I think the interesting question that came up in these two chapters is the difference between repression and suppression. Is there a difference? Repression is defined as the rejection from consciousness of painful memories, feelings, or impulses and suppression the conscious inhibition of an impulse. McNally is suggesting that repression is done unconsciously, so does that mean suppression is the conscious decision to inhibit specific painful memories? They seem to have overlapping characteristics that can be further specified. How is inhibiting an impulse that causes traumatic feelings to occur different from ignoring them? McNally also describes dissociation as memory that’s been repressed, but rises to the surface of our current conscious after the actual memory has already taken place. The example he uses is child abuse and how adults remembered their experiences as adults. Does this suggest that we aren’t always conscious of what’s happening to us any moment? Or do we consolidate our memories long after they’ve occurred? We reminisce about past events and discover new details that we may have overlooked all the time. Finally, I thought the most convincing theory mentioned in chapter six is the Bessel van de Kolk theory. In short, it explains that recovering and integrating traumatic events into meaningful narratives produce therapeutic relief. This theory is very familiar even in everyday conversation. We rely on others to listen intently about daily issues, relationship issues, etc. and listen to one another as a way to express and release mental tension. This activity is liberating and makes sense that it would work on a grander scale of traumatic experiences.
These chapters further explained the process of suppressing memory or repressing memory in response to trauma. In regards to the terms suppression and repression, Freud and others believe that the words are interchangeable, while some believe that repression is done unconsciously and suppression consciously. It seems that if people could consciously forget they would do it more often. It’s probably possible to forget about something by distracting oneself, but it seems unlikely that a person can have the control over his mind to not be reminded later of what he was trying to forget. The vocabulary of trauma seems to still be developing, but I think it’s appropriate to use a separate word for the act of making an effort to forget a memory. It’s a bit scary that our brain makes the decision of whether or not to hide a memory from us, and if it’s a traumatic memory it can still affect the way a person acts and he won’t know why. It’s not completely out of our control though, because we can choose what we want to talk about to better encode what we want to remember. Studies on overgeneral memories show that depressed patients are less specific with their memories. It is said that this is because they are unable to recall specific memories because of poor problem-solving skills. Depression is therefore harder to deal with because “difficulty retrieving specific autobiographical memories makes it harder to solve personal problems in the present.” The reasoning is that to deal with problems of depression, things in the past need to be remembered in order to help know how to cope. By focusing all attention on one thing, others are forgotten. Women who avoided thinking of their pasts often had overgeneral memories. By telling others in detail about their trauma they have to go over details that are personal and hard to talk about, so yes, they will be general when telling others about their experiences. Speaking is a way of overcoming trauma and it is said that those with high levels of intelligence can tell trauma narratives, and to figure out how to deal with the effects of trauma. It’s still not clear to me why talking about trauma is such a cure, but it seems having a general memory affects people’s presents and futures.
I think it’s interesting that over general memory was found to be linked with PTSD and depression. McNally writes that “Apparently, difficulty retrieving specific autobiographical memories makes it harder to solve personal problems in the present , and this, in turn, makes it harder to overcome depression” (131). Which comes first, though? Do depression and PTSD lead to over general memory, or could an inherently over general memory increase the risk of PTSD and depression? It’s a “which came first—the chicken and the egg?” type situation. According to this passage, McNally seems to view memories as tools, templates to base actions in the present upon. I see memories in this way as well, and I agree that an over general memory view of the past would make it more difficult to overcome depression and PTSD. At the same time, depression and PTSD seem to induce over general memory. I believe that an over general memory can increase the risk of depression and PTSD, while depression and PTSD can result in an over general memory. I also believe that an over general memory is linked to the lack of an episodic memory. It seems that episodic memory—putting one’s own individual stamp on an experience—is what distinguishes memories. When one is depressed they may not own their experiences as much as one who isn’t/ Such tendencies in themselves can cause depression, but depression could also be responsible for such tendency, and thus make it harder for one to overcome their depression. In a study, McNally attributes over general memory in relation to PTSD, to the “intrusive thoughts” (131) that PTSD consists of. Because victims of PTSD have intrusive thoughts of past experiences, perhaps they drown out other aspects of memory. I wonder if certain people are more prone to developing PTSD when they are inclined to attach themselves to thoughts and experiences, perhaps by over-personalizing them. This over personalization of thoughts and experiences seems to lead one to be consumed by their thoughts and experiences, which is in accordance with PTSD, and the opposite seems to be the case of depression. Yet both have to do with over general memory. Perhaps over general memory in depressed individuals has to do with the depersonalization of one’s experiences, while in individuals with PTSD it has to do with the over personalization of—and thus consumption by—one’s experiences, therefore drowning out the specificity of other experiences and thoughts. I’m only musing, but I think that this would be something interesting to look into. Whether one’s memories are over general or distinct seems to have a lot of important implications.
In chapters five and six of Remembering Trauma, I was particularly drawn to the section on memory and multiple personality disorder. There is much controversy in the field because some believe that it is a genuine disorder caused by physical and sexual abuse endured during childhood and that can be looked at as an extreme form of PTSD. However, others question how genuine the link between childhood trauma and MPD really is. All agree though that patients with MPD have problems with memory, and that information encoded by one personality is not able to be retrieved or is difficult to be retrieved by other personalities. Studies have shown that words learned by one personality are very rarely recognized by other personalities. However, memory transfer has occurred across personalities on perceptual implicit memory tests that did not require the individuals to process the meaning of words. Therefore, when the meaning of words is taken into account, the information learned by one personality is likely to be inaccessible to other personalities. It is crazy to think that a person with MPD not only has many multiple personalities, but that much information is not transferred from one personality to another. Consequently, each personality in subjects with MPD leads very different lives.
An intriguing point that McNally brought up is that it is impossible to tell in individuals with MPD if the other personalities are genuinely unable to remember the information encoded by another personalities or whether they are just unwilling to report it. MPD is characterized by a failure to remember things encoded by another personality, however it is very possible that a MPD subject might remember information encoded by another personality but decide not to reveal it on a memory test and claim that they can’t remember it. There are studies showing that MPD patients just claim to not remember material encoded by other personalities but rather they are not actually impaired in retrieving this information. Huntjens study found that MPD patients showed priming effects across different personalities on conceptual and perceptual implicit memory tests, even though they claimed amnesia for the information encoded by the first personality. They showed normal implicit memory effects across personalities because they were exposed to material during encoding that affected their performance during testing. In their other study, they found that the second personality recognized fifty percent of words learned by the first personality regardless of the fact that the second personality claimed to have amnesia for the first list of words. Huntjens has shown that MPD patients do not display between-personality amnesia for neutral information on objective tests of explicit memory.
Objective tests show that MPD patients can actually remember material encoded by another personality. Therefore we have to take into account the fact that they maybe just genuinely believe that they can’t remember the material. This might have to do with the fact that MPD as a disease is associated with the deficits of memory-transfer across personalities, and as a result MPD patients are engrained with the idea that they have issues with this. Or rather it could just be a factor of the disease that makes them believe this. Another idea is that MPD patients might be lying about their amnesia and merely deny remembering it. McNally explains that MPD might be characterized by a disconnection between the subjective experience of remembering and objective memory performance. There obviously needs to be more research done on determining whether memory deficits across personalities in MPD patients reveal genuine retrieval problems or whether these individuals are faking their inability to remember material encoded by other personalities. It is an extremely difficult issue to analyze because all the research is based on and tested on these individuals with MPD who exhibit traits making it very hard to determine whether they’re ever telling the truth or whether they’re ever being genuine about their responses, as the truth could constantly be changing.
Chapter’s five and six of Richard J. McNally’s Remembering Trauma discusses the effects of traumatic experiences on memory function, later recall, and brain structures themselves. While it is widely agreed upon that individuals with PTSD remember their traumatic experiences with such vividness as to nearly relive them, many people with PTSD report experiencing general forgetfulness in daily life. However, studies such as the one completed by Bradley Axelrod and Boaz Milner, as well as Murray Stein and his colleagues, have demonstrated that those who have experienced a traumatic event seldom experience memory impairments. Nevertheless, deficits in one’s memory among those who have experienced trauma has been seen, especially in Gulf War Veterans and former Prisoners of War who were starved during their imprisonment. More often than not, McNally concludes, the memories of people with PTSD alone are just as well functioning as the general population without PTSD. Memory impairments, when they do occur, most often affect people with PTSD as well as another psychiatric disorder, such as depression. While PTSD alone has shown no direct affect on memory, it is accepted by nearly all researches and psychologists that individuals with Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD) exhibit profound memory impairments. More interesting, however, was the discussion of overgeneral autobiographical memory. In studying the effect of mood on memory, Mark Williams and his colleagues revealed that as opposed to healthy individuals, individuals who are either suicidal or depressed have an impaired ability to remember personally significant specific events, and instead speak in general terms about a general event such as “happy reminds me of when I was in elementary school” (McNally 2003: 131). The inability to remember specific events from one’s life has a slew of consequences including difficulty solving problems and recovering from depression, as one can not remember which solutions to the problem worked in prior similar situations. In patients with PTSD, not only did the aforementioned problems occur, but a weakened ability to imagine one’s future occurred as well, probably partly a result of being unable to retrieve specific episodes from the past which helps to imagine what will come next. In studying adults with a history of childhood abuse, including sexual and physical abuse, neglect and substance abusing parents, Evan Parks and Richard Balon found that in comparison to psychiatric patients and healthy subjects without a history of abuse, individuals having experienced a trauma “more often failed to retrieve any memory in response to emotion cue words, took longer to retrieve memories,” recalled their first memory occurring at an older age, and “recalled fewer memories from their earlier than later childhood years” (McNally 2003: 131). In a 2000 study performed by Arntz, Meeren and Wessel, the three reported that there was no direct relationship between generalizing one’s memories and experiencing trauma as a child. Instead, they discovered that individuals who had experienced traumatic childhood events, such as abuse, and who had PTSD or another psychiatric disorder were more prone to overgeneralizing their memories than individuals without a disorder. I was particularly interested in McNally’s discussion of whether an individual can forget traumatic experiences. Many therapists in the field of trauma claim that children who were physically or sexually abused develop a method of coping in which they engage their attention elsewhere during the abuse to avoid encoding and recalling the abuse itself. Jennifer Freyd reinforced this idea stating that this cognitive mechanism for coping with trauma is particularly present in individuals who were molested as children by someone they trusted, and that failure to encode the event resulted in their later inability to remember it. In agreement with the contrary, I believe that just because one might disengage their attention from their abuser or what is happening to them in order to survive through that specific episode, that does not impair their ability to remember being abused later in life. In fact, instead of forgetting traumatic events that occurred in one’s childhood as a coping mechanism, there is spectacular empirical evidence showing that those having gone through trauma actually develop an disabled capacity to forget what they’ve experienced.
McNally’s book “Remembering Trauma” brings to light the incredible importance of trauma research, especially how some aspects of this field are highly debated and extremely contentious between two different points of view. McNally highlights many of the more prominent debates in the field, which include debates over multiple personality disorder, repression, Freudian psychoanalysis, etc. McNally makes his views clear, and I would say the book borders on biased at times, though he nonetheless always presents the opposing side of popular arguments. However, I must say that in most cases I believe I agree with him. And yet, I think, this is such a complicated field for such debates to be involved. Denying the idea of repression, supporting a socio-cognitive view of trauma induced disorders, and believing in therapist-implanted memories could lead to inadvertently ignoring a real traumatic experience from which a patient suffers. This is why I believe the field is so dangerously complicated. Although I believe that I ultimately support a socio-cognitive view, as does McNally, it is not to say that patients who have “developed” multiple personalities do not have other severe underlying problems, such as depression or extreme dissociation. These issues coupled with trauma and social influences could absolutely lead to the development of such a disorder. Although proponents of the socio-cognitive model may not believe that multiple personality disorder has a true, neurological basis, it is still important that patients do not feel discredited or disvalued. As always, a ‘fine line’ seems to exist with these issues. The same goes with repression. I do not agree with the Freudian concept of repression, and I believe that it has gone too far in the way it has slowly worked itself into current culture. A huge portion of the population who, I would guess, know nothing further of psychology, seem to be expert psychologists when it comes to repression. Yet, simultaneously, I believe it is possible to, perhaps, consciously repress a painful memory (more like the discussed concept of dissociation). If a memory is so painful one must try to disconnect from it, it MAY be possible that the correct trigger may pull it back into their memory after years of ignorance. Although I believe the concept of repression is far too overused today, denial of any such “recovered memory” borders on endangering the patient and further traumatizing them. It is these cases where I believe neurological research on false memory is the most important. Currently there is no way to differentiate between false and recovered memory, as one can with false and true memories. However, further research on this might allow a more careful approach to contentious subjects such as multiple personalities and repression.
It is essential to our emotional stability to consciously suppress certain memories in our day-to-day life. This doesn’t necessarily mean that the memories are all horrific or significant. It is impossible for us to bring some ideas and events to the forefront without pushing other ideas and events to the background. Pushing these thoughts however powerful or weak is an act of suppression. Repression is not applicable to all human beings. Truly traumatic memories require a much more serious course of action. I think that the ability to unconsciously suppress a traumatic memory is quite impressive. It is much easier for someone to function in our society if they are not constantly reminded of their painful past experience. At some point the repression cannot hold up anymore. The person’s traumatic memories invade their present thoughts and traumatize them all over again!
7 comments:
I think the interesting question that came up in these two chapters is the difference between repression and suppression. Is there a difference? Repression is defined as the rejection from consciousness of painful memories, feelings, or impulses and suppression the conscious inhibition of an impulse. McNally is suggesting that repression is done unconsciously, so does that mean suppression is the conscious decision to inhibit specific painful memories? They seem to have overlapping characteristics that can be further specified. How is inhibiting an impulse that causes traumatic feelings to occur different from ignoring them?
McNally also describes dissociation as memory that’s been repressed, but rises to the surface of our current conscious after the actual memory has already taken place. The example he uses is child abuse and how adults remembered their experiences as adults. Does this suggest that we aren’t always conscious of what’s happening to us any moment? Or do we consolidate our memories long after they’ve occurred? We reminisce about past events and discover new details that we may have overlooked all the time.
Finally, I thought the most convincing theory mentioned in chapter six is the Bessel van de Kolk theory. In short, it explains that recovering and integrating traumatic events into meaningful narratives produce therapeutic relief. This theory is very familiar even in everyday conversation. We rely on others to listen intently about daily issues, relationship issues, etc. and listen to one another as a way to express and release mental tension. This activity is liberating and makes sense that it would work on a grander scale of traumatic experiences.
These chapters further explained the process of suppressing memory or repressing memory in response to trauma. In regards to the terms suppression and repression, Freud and others believe that the words are interchangeable, while some believe that repression is done unconsciously and suppression consciously. It seems that if people could consciously forget they would do it more often. It’s probably possible to forget about something by distracting oneself, but it seems unlikely that a person can have the control over his mind to not be reminded later of what he was trying to forget. The vocabulary of trauma seems to still be developing, but I think it’s appropriate to use a separate word for the act of making an effort to forget a memory. It’s a bit scary that our brain makes the decision of whether or not to hide a memory from us, and if it’s a traumatic memory it can still affect the way a person acts and he won’t know why. It’s not completely out of our control though, because we can choose what we want to talk about to better encode what we want to remember. Studies on overgeneral memories show that depressed patients are less specific with their memories. It is said that this is because they are unable to recall specific memories because of poor problem-solving skills. Depression is therefore harder to deal with because “difficulty retrieving specific autobiographical memories makes it harder to solve personal problems in the present.” The reasoning is that to deal with problems of depression, things in the past need to be remembered in order to help know how to cope. By focusing all attention on one thing, others are forgotten. Women who avoided thinking of their pasts often had overgeneral memories. By telling others in detail about their trauma they have to go over details that are personal and hard to talk about, so yes, they will be general when telling others about their experiences. Speaking is a way of overcoming trauma and it is said that those with high levels of intelligence can tell trauma narratives, and to figure out how to deal with the effects of trauma. It’s still not clear to me why talking about trauma is such a cure, but it seems having a general memory affects people’s presents and futures.
I think it’s interesting that over general memory was found to be linked with PTSD and depression. McNally writes that “Apparently, difficulty retrieving specific autobiographical memories makes it harder to solve personal problems in the present , and this, in turn, makes it harder to overcome depression” (131). Which comes first, though? Do depression and PTSD lead to over general memory, or could an inherently over general memory increase the risk of PTSD and depression? It’s a “which came first—the chicken and the egg?” type situation. According to this passage, McNally seems to view memories as tools, templates to base actions in the present upon. I see memories in this way as well, and I agree that an over general memory view of the past would make it more difficult to overcome depression and PTSD. At the same time, depression and PTSD seem to induce over general memory. I believe that an over general memory can increase the risk of depression and PTSD, while depression and PTSD can result in an over general memory.
I also believe that an over general memory is linked to the lack of an episodic memory. It seems that episodic memory—putting one’s own individual stamp on an experience—is what distinguishes memories. When one is depressed they may not own their experiences as much as one who isn’t/ Such tendencies in themselves can cause depression, but depression could also be responsible for such tendency, and thus make it harder for one to overcome their depression.
In a study, McNally attributes over general memory in relation to PTSD, to the “intrusive thoughts” (131) that PTSD consists of. Because victims of PTSD have intrusive thoughts of past experiences, perhaps they drown out other aspects of memory. I wonder if certain people are more prone to developing PTSD when they are inclined to attach themselves to thoughts and experiences, perhaps by over-personalizing them. This over personalization of thoughts and experiences seems to lead one to be consumed by their thoughts and experiences, which is in accordance with PTSD, and the opposite seems to be the case of depression. Yet both have to do with over general memory. Perhaps over general memory in depressed individuals has to do with the depersonalization of one’s experiences, while in individuals with PTSD it has to do with the over personalization of—and thus consumption by—one’s experiences, therefore drowning out the specificity of other experiences and thoughts.
I’m only musing, but I think that this would be something interesting to look into. Whether one’s memories are over general or distinct seems to have a lot of important implications.
In chapters five and six of Remembering Trauma, I was particularly drawn to the section on memory and multiple personality disorder. There is much controversy in the field because some believe that it is a genuine disorder caused by physical and sexual abuse endured during childhood and that can be looked at as an extreme form of PTSD. However, others question how genuine the link between childhood trauma and MPD really is. All agree though that patients with MPD have problems with memory, and that information encoded by one personality is not able to be retrieved or is difficult to be retrieved by other personalities. Studies have shown that words learned by one personality are very rarely recognized by other personalities. However, memory transfer has occurred across personalities on perceptual implicit memory tests that did not require the individuals to process the meaning of words. Therefore, when the meaning of words is taken into account, the information learned by one personality is likely to be inaccessible to other personalities. It is crazy to think that a person with MPD not only has many multiple personalities, but that much information is not transferred from one personality to another. Consequently, each personality in subjects with MPD leads very different lives.
An intriguing point that McNally brought up is that it is impossible to tell in individuals with MPD if the other personalities are genuinely unable to remember the information encoded by another personalities or whether they are just unwilling to report it. MPD is characterized by a failure to remember things encoded by another personality, however it is very possible that a MPD subject might remember information encoded by another personality but decide not to reveal it on a memory test and claim that they can’t remember it. There are studies showing that MPD patients just claim to not remember material encoded by other personalities but rather they are not actually impaired in retrieving this information. Huntjens study found that MPD patients showed priming effects across different personalities on conceptual and perceptual implicit memory tests, even though they claimed amnesia for the information encoded by the first personality. They showed normal implicit memory effects across personalities because they were exposed to material during encoding that affected their performance during testing. In their other study, they found that the second personality recognized fifty percent of words learned by the first personality regardless of the fact that the second personality claimed to have amnesia for the first list of words. Huntjens has shown that MPD patients do not display between-personality amnesia for neutral information on objective tests of explicit memory.
Objective tests show that MPD patients can actually remember material encoded by another personality. Therefore we have to take into account the fact that they maybe just genuinely believe that they can’t remember the material. This might have to do with the fact that MPD as a disease is associated with the deficits of memory-transfer across personalities, and as a result MPD patients are engrained with the idea that they have issues with this. Or rather it could just be a factor of the disease that makes them believe this. Another idea is that MPD patients might be lying about their amnesia and merely deny remembering it. McNally explains that MPD might be characterized by a disconnection between the subjective experience of remembering and objective memory performance. There obviously needs to be more research done on determining whether memory deficits across personalities in MPD patients reveal genuine retrieval problems or whether these individuals are faking their inability to remember material encoded by other personalities. It is an extremely difficult issue to analyze because all the research is based on and tested on these individuals with MPD who exhibit traits making it very hard to determine whether they’re ever telling the truth or whether they’re ever being genuine about their responses, as the truth could constantly be changing.
Chapter’s five and six of Richard J. McNally’s Remembering Trauma discusses the effects of traumatic experiences on memory function, later recall, and brain structures themselves. While it is widely agreed upon that individuals with PTSD remember their traumatic experiences with such vividness as to nearly relive them, many people with PTSD report experiencing general forgetfulness in daily life. However, studies such as the one completed by Bradley Axelrod and Boaz Milner, as well as Murray Stein and his colleagues, have demonstrated that those who have experienced a traumatic event seldom experience memory impairments. Nevertheless, deficits in one’s memory among those who have experienced trauma has been seen, especially in Gulf War Veterans and former Prisoners of War who were starved during their imprisonment. More often than not, McNally concludes, the memories of people with PTSD alone are just as well functioning as the general population without PTSD. Memory impairments, when they do occur, most often affect people with PTSD as well as another psychiatric disorder, such as depression.
While PTSD alone has shown no direct affect on memory, it is accepted by nearly all researches and psychologists that individuals with Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD) exhibit profound memory impairments. More interesting, however, was the discussion of overgeneral autobiographical memory. In studying the effect of mood on memory, Mark Williams and his colleagues revealed that as opposed to healthy individuals, individuals who are either suicidal or depressed have an impaired ability to remember personally significant specific events, and instead speak in general terms about a general event such as “happy reminds me of when I was in elementary school” (McNally 2003: 131). The inability to remember specific events from one’s life has a slew of consequences including difficulty solving problems and recovering from depression, as one can not remember which solutions to the problem worked in prior similar situations. In patients with PTSD, not only did the aforementioned problems occur, but a weakened ability to imagine one’s future occurred as well, probably partly a result of being unable to retrieve specific episodes from the past which helps to imagine what will come next.
In studying adults with a history of childhood abuse, including sexual and physical abuse, neglect and substance abusing parents, Evan Parks and Richard Balon found that in comparison to psychiatric patients and healthy subjects without a history of abuse, individuals having experienced a trauma “more often failed to retrieve any memory in response to emotion cue words, took longer to retrieve memories,” recalled their first memory occurring at an older age, and “recalled fewer memories from their earlier than later childhood years” (McNally 2003: 131). In a 2000 study performed by Arntz, Meeren and Wessel, the three reported that there was no direct relationship between generalizing one’s memories and experiencing trauma as a child. Instead, they discovered that individuals who had experienced traumatic childhood events, such as abuse, and who had PTSD or another psychiatric disorder were more prone to overgeneralizing their memories than individuals without a disorder.
I was particularly interested in McNally’s discussion of whether an individual can forget traumatic experiences. Many therapists in the field of trauma claim that children who were physically or sexually abused develop a method of coping in which they engage their attention elsewhere during the abuse to avoid encoding and recalling the abuse itself. Jennifer Freyd reinforced this idea stating that this cognitive mechanism for coping with trauma is particularly present in individuals who were molested as children by someone they trusted, and that failure to encode the event resulted in their later inability to remember it. In agreement with the contrary, I believe that just because one might disengage their attention from their abuser or what is happening to them in order to survive through that specific episode, that does not impair their ability to remember being abused later in life. In fact, instead of forgetting traumatic events that occurred in one’s childhood as a coping mechanism, there is spectacular empirical evidence showing that those having gone through trauma actually develop an disabled capacity to forget what they’ve experienced.
McNally’s book “Remembering Trauma” brings to light the incredible importance of trauma research, especially how some aspects of this field are highly debated and extremely contentious between two different points of view. McNally highlights many of the more prominent debates in the field, which include debates over multiple personality disorder, repression, Freudian psychoanalysis, etc. McNally makes his views clear, and I would say the book borders on biased at times, though he nonetheless always presents the opposing side of popular arguments. However, I must say that in most cases I believe I agree with him. And yet, I think, this is such a complicated field for such debates to be involved. Denying the idea of repression, supporting a socio-cognitive view of trauma induced disorders, and believing in therapist-implanted memories could lead to inadvertently ignoring a real traumatic experience from which a patient suffers. This is why I believe the field is so dangerously complicated. Although I believe that I ultimately support a socio-cognitive view, as does McNally, it is not to say that patients who have “developed” multiple personalities do not have other severe underlying problems, such as depression or extreme dissociation. These issues coupled with trauma and social influences could absolutely lead to the development of such a disorder. Although proponents of the socio-cognitive model may not believe that multiple personality disorder has a true, neurological basis, it is still important that patients do not feel discredited or disvalued. As always, a ‘fine line’ seems to exist with these issues. The same goes with repression. I do not agree with the Freudian concept of repression, and I believe that it has gone too far in the way it has slowly worked itself into current culture. A huge portion of the population who, I would guess, know nothing further of psychology, seem to be expert psychologists when it comes to repression. Yet, simultaneously, I believe it is possible to, perhaps, consciously repress a painful memory (more like the discussed concept of dissociation). If a memory is so painful one must try to disconnect from it, it MAY be possible that the correct trigger may pull it back into their memory after years of ignorance. Although I believe the concept of repression is far too overused today, denial of any such “recovered memory” borders on endangering the patient and further traumatizing them. It is these cases where I believe neurological research on false memory is the most important. Currently there is no way to differentiate between false and recovered memory, as one can with false and true memories. However, further research on this might allow a more careful approach to contentious subjects such as multiple personalities and repression.
It is essential to our emotional stability to consciously suppress certain memories in our day-to-day life. This doesn’t necessarily mean that the memories are all horrific or significant. It is impossible for us to bring some ideas and events to the forefront without pushing other ideas and events to the background. Pushing these thoughts however powerful or weak is an act of suppression. Repression is not applicable to all human beings. Truly traumatic memories require a much more serious course of action. I think that the ability to unconsciously suppress a traumatic memory is quite impressive. It is much easier for someone to function in our society if they are not constantly reminded of their painful past experience. At some point the repression cannot hold up anymore. The person’s traumatic memories invade their present thoughts and traumatize them all over again!
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