Forgetting to Remember

Forgetting to Remember: The Source of your Symptoms?

Imagine going about your daily business when, for some reason or another, you find yourself immersed in an intense, disturbing flashback of a traumatic event that you never knew you experienced? This bizarre scenario is more commonplace than might be supposed and is opening up all sorts of legal and therapeutic controversy. Repression is one of the most haunting concepts in psychology. The rationale is that some shocking occurrence is pushed back into an inaccessible corner of the unconscious only to be retrieved later by a most confounded consciousness (1). Is the memory really real? If it is, why was it lost in the first place and what triggered its return? And how is it to be dealt with?

Perhaps a better term for repression is dissociation. "Dissociation refers to those discontinuities of the brain, the disconnections of mind that we all harbor without awareness" (2). Dissociation lets us step aside, split off from our own knowledge, behavior, emotions, and body sensations, our self-control, identity, and memory. This splitting of mind and pigeon holding of experience is a natural adaptation to the complex demands of daily life. One demonstration of this phenomenon involves a knee injury patient named Anastasia. Facing emergency surgery with a poor prognosis, she chose a spinal anesthetic with no sedative, so she could stay awake and observe the operation. She remembers the clinician administering the spinal injection, but that's all. Her next consecutive memory of the ordeal was simply "waking up" in the recovery room, disappointed that she had "fallen asleep and missed the surgery." She was further perplexed when the surgeon walked in and thanked her for "a great discussion." Anastasia eventually realized that she had carried on a technical discourse for nearly two hours, a conversation she, to this day, has absolutely no recollection of (2).

An even more dramatic illustration of dissociation (without, however, repression) is depicted in Donald Wyman's horrifying experience. In the summer of 1993, while working in a remote Pennsylvania area clearing timber, Wyman suffered a terrible accident. A huge tree fell on him, pinning his left leg. He knew he would die before anybody found him if he did not take matters into his own hands. So he made a tourniquet from a rawhide bootlace and used his chainsaw wrench to tighten it. He then went about methodically cutting off his left leg with his pocket knife.