Repressed Memories

Among the most interesting ways we can deceive ourselves is through memory. Though there are countless undisputed ways in which memory fails or becomes distorted, the concept of “repression” has been among the most controversial in modern psychology. On the one hand, proponents believe that repression is a mental mechanism that helps us to deny the reality of true traumatic experiences. On the other hand, critics of the concept of repression argue that efforts to “recover” repressed memories can lead to very rich, seemingly real, false memories for events that never happened. What these opposing views have in common is that both implicate repression in the self-deceptive functions of memory.