But clinicians who also do research have been publishing peer-reviewed studies of dissociative amnesia in leading journals for decades. Tensions between the two positions have often been framed as a debate between hard-core scientists on the false-memory side and therapists in clinical practice in the delayed-memory camp. They maintain that this psychological defense mechanism-known as dissociative amnesia-turns up routinely in the patients they encounter.
Trauma therapists assert that abuse experienced early in life can overwhelm the central nervous system, causing children to split off a painful memory from conscious awareness. Some prominent cases of recovered memory of child abuse have turned out to be false, elicited by overzealous therapists.īut psychotherapists who specialize in treating adult survivors of childhood trauma argue that laboratory experiments do not rule out the possibility that some delayed memories recalled by adults are factual. The skepticism is based on a body of research showing that memory is unreliable and that simple manipulations in the lab can make people believe they had an experience that never happened. Warnings about the reliability of a forgotten traumatic event that is later recalled-known formally as a delayed memory-have been endorsed by leading mental health organizations such as the American Psychiatric Association (APA).
#TRAUMATIC AMNESIA MOVIE#
And the validity of buried trauma turns up as a point of contention in court cases and in television and movie story lines.
When adults claim to have suddenly recalled painful events from their childhood, are those memories likely to be accurate? This question is the basis of the “memory wars” that have roiled psychology for decades.
0 kommentar(er)
