In 1990, George Franklin was convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison based on the testimony of his 28-year-old daughter Eileen. She described seeing him rape her best friend and then smash her skull with a rock.
When Eileen testified at her father’s trial, her memory of the murder was relatively fresh. It was less than a year old. Yet the murder happened 20 years earlier, when she was 8 years old.
How can you have a one-year-old memory of something that happened 20 years ago? According to the prosecution, Eileen repressed her memory of the murder. Then much later she recovered it in complete detail.
Can a memory of something so harrowing disappear for two decades and then resurface in a reliable form?
This case launched a huge debate between memory researchers like me who argue there is no credible scientific evidence that repressed memories exist and practicing clinicians who claim that repressed memories are real.
This controversy is not merely an academic one. Real people’s lives have been shattered by newly recollected traumatic experiences from childhood. I’ve seen this firsthand as a memory expert who consults on legal cases involving defendants accused of crimes they allegedly committed years or even decades ago. Often the only evidence linking the defendant to the crime is a recovered memory.
But the scientific community disagrees about the existence of the phenomenon of repressed memory.
Freud was the father of repression
Nineteenth-century psychoanalytic theorist Sigmund Freud developed the concept of repression. He considered it a defense mechanism people use to protect themselves from traumatic experiences that become too overwhelming.
Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud.
Paul De La Roussert/Wikimedia Commons
The idea is that repression buries memories of trauma in your unconscious, where they – unlike other memories – reside unknown to you. They remain hidden, in a pristine, fixed form.
In Freud’s view, repressed memories make themselves known by leaking out in mental and physical symptoms – symptoms that can be relieved only through recovering the traumatic memory in a safe psychological environment.
In the 1980s, increasing numbers of therapists became concerned about the prevalence of child sexual abuse and the historical tendencies to dismiss or hide the maltreatment of children. This shift gave new life to the concept of repression.
Rise of repressed memory recovery
Therapists in this camp told clients that their symptoms, such as anxiety, depression or eating disorders, were the result of repressed memories of childhood sexual abuse that needed to be remembered to heal. To recover these memories, therapists used a range of techniques such as hypnosis, suggestive questioning, repeated imagining, bodywork and group sessions.
Did recovered-memory therapy work? Many people who entered therapy for common mental health issues did come out with…
