Recovered memories

Recovered memories.

The issues surrounding repressed, recovered, or false memories have sparked one of the greatest controversies in the mental health profession in the twentieth century. We review evidence concerning the existence of the repression and recovery of autobiographical memories of traumatic events and research on the development of false autobiographical memories, how specific therapeutic procedures c...

Memories Improbable: "Recovered Memories" in Perspective

The Controversy over Recovered Memories

The authors discuss 4 issues in this commentary: (a) the assumptions and evidence used to support the case for dissociated and recovered memories (noting that the evidence is weak and the assumptions internally inconsistent as well as contradictory to a mass of experimental evidence about human memory); (b) the process by which dissociated memories are said to be recovered (events that were ori...

False recognition in women reporting recovered memories of sexual abuse.

False recognition--the mistaken belief that one has previously encountered a novel item--was examined in four groups of subjects: women reporting recovered memories of childhood sexual abuse, women who believe that they were sexually abused as children but who cannot recall this abuse (the "repressed" group), women who were sexually abused as children and always remembered the abuse, and women ...

Recovered memories in clinical practice - a research review.

The problem of recovered memories concerns not only psychiatry, psychology or psychotherapy but it is also an important legal and judicial issue. Clinicians, scientists and lawyers are in unsolved dispute, called "memory wars", concerning the credibility of these memories, especially if they were recovered following specific therapeutic techniques or using self-help books. Many cases of recover...