Repressed Childhood Memories

Repression of memories is a controversial topic that has been argued for many years. Some support the myth and it has been imposed in cases to obtain legal convictions. Although researchers have found methods to refute the myth, individuals still believe they have repressed a memory of a traumatic event. This has recently taken place in 2007 in the Colorado vs. Marshall case. Marshall Adam Walker was accused of sexually assaulting a seventeen year-old who claimed that he made three boys pose nude for videos. He was sentenced to 24 years to life in prison. One of the boys claimed to recover a repressed memory of the event while watching a movie (“Legal cases (53), 2010”). This student’s claim made an influential impact on the perpetrator’s sentence. This reflects the power these accusations have had recently in the media and in criminal cases that involve a traumatic event such as sexual assault.
This myth has a had a long history that dates

back as early as the 19th century. The support for this myth came about from Jean Charcot and Sigmund Freud (McNally, 2012). Charcot developed the idea of ignorance of the trauma through his hypnotic work. He triggered hysterical paralysis and attacks but the individuals did not know what caused the symptoms. This initiated the era of post-traumatic amnesia in the hypnotized patients, which was considered hysteria (McNally, 2012). This procedure attempted to find these memories of trauma. In the 20th century, Freud continued to promote this idea and invented treatment to recover memories (McNally, 2012). He believed that sexual abuse at a young age could turn into hysteria as they grew into adulthood and be triggered (McNally, 2012). The therapy consisted of expressing the trauma, but failed, which eventually lead to the creation of psychoanalysis (McNally, 2012).
McNally (2003) conducted a series of studies that refuted the repression of memories and their accuracy. In both of his experiments, the author recruited four groups of female participants: A control group that did not experience childhood sexual abuse (CSA), a continuous memory group that has remembered their trauma throughout their life, a repressed memory group who had a suspicion of a trauma of abuse, but no memory, and a recovered memory group who remembered their trauma after a long period of time without having thought of the trauma directly. In the first experiment, McNally tested the disengagement of trauma related cues. The hypothesis being refuted claimed that individuals who have experienced trauma do not pay attention to any cues that they may perceive as threatening. During this study, participants were told to remember and forget certain words in a list that included positive, neutral, or trauma related words. Once participants finished the list, they were asked to write down all of the words they remembered, regardless of if they were told to forget them or not. Results indicated that individuals who experienced CSA recalled trauma related words more readily, refuting the hypothesis. In the second experiment, McNally tested participants in the four groups and their ability to remember trauma related words and neutral words. This was done by using the Stroop Color naming task. The researcher aimed to disprove the hypothesis that trauma survivors take longer to name the colors of trauma related words. Results showed that there was no significant difference between the naming of either category of words.
McNally and researchers (2006) furthered his studies on refuting this myth by assessing specific childhood memories through the Autobiographical Memory Test (AMT).

Researchers did this by testing four groups with the same criteria as the previous study, a control group and continuous, repressed, recovered memories groups of CSA. During this test, participants were given a word and must state a memory of an event that occurred no longer than one day in one minute or less. Half of the word cues were prompted to respond to a memory from childhood and the other half a memory from adulthood. Participants were then asked to report the date that the event occurred. The latency to retrieve a memory was recorded and used as a dependent variable. Although all four groups retrieved adulthood memories with ease, results revealed that all three groups with memories of CSA had difficulty in retrieving childhood memories. The repressed memory group performed significantly worse in the retrieval of these specific childhood

memories.
The repression of traumatic memories is still controversial to some researchers. Although scientists have found opposing evidence, the theory of memory repression remains unknown. Although most can agree that repression of trauma is false, this can be a difficult situation to encounter in a courtroom when someone is confident they experienced a trauma, but repressed it. Individuals often believe they have repressed their traumas when they combat psychological symptoms, such as depression or dreams of “trauma,” which are assumed to befall them because of the “actual” event, which has no corroborating evidence (McNally, 2003). Overall, researchers struggle in exploring the myth of repressed trauma and its validity because it is unknown if autobiographical memories occurred.