The morning paper recently carried an article on "repressed memories" and how we should deal with them so we can come out stronger after we've faced our demons. This is one topic I have always been intrigued with.
Repressed memories or "motivated forgetting" are childhood or past memories that have been erased from our conscious mind. Such memories may later resurface or be recalled as a result of a certain incident or without any provocation or reason.
There are ongoing debates among psychologists and psychotherapists on whether or not traumatic experiences can be repressed out of conscious awareness and later recalled — spontaneously or through treatment. Divided opinions shroud this rather obscure topic. Some even question the very concept of "repressed memory." I don't have an opinion here as I'm neither an expert in this filed nor have I studied psychology, apart from a very distressing paper on Freud and his friends in college.
But age and experience have taught me that memory is unreliable. I have pictures in my mind of my childhood, and I'm not certain if they really happened.
I have always found it rather strange that I remember very little of my childhood. The little that I recall is again a hazy gray, but they were definitely not the best years of my life. The human mind functions in the most complex ways. It does exactly as you want without you giving it a conscious command. The mind chooses to throw out the ugly and the bad and automatically blocks bad memories; it works as an automatic defense mechanism. This is all very well and I'm glad the mind works the way it does but I'm still left with a couple of nagging questions as to what's real and what's not.
Repressed memories or "motivated forgetting" are childhood or past memories that have been erased from our conscious mind. Such memories may later resurface or be recalled as a result of a certain incident or without any provocation or reason.
There are ongoing debates among psychologists and psychotherapists on whether or not traumatic experiences can be repressed out of conscious awareness and later recalled — spontaneously or through treatment. Divided opinions shroud this rather obscure topic. Some even question the very concept of "repressed memory." I don't have an opinion here as I'm neither an expert in this filed nor have I studied psychology, apart from a very distressing paper on Freud and his friends in college.
But age and experience have taught me that memory is unreliable. I have pictures in my mind of my childhood, and I'm not certain if they really happened.
I have always found it rather strange that I remember very little of my childhood. The little that I recall is again a hazy gray, but they were definitely not the best years of my life. The human mind functions in the most complex ways. It does exactly as you want without you giving it a conscious command. The mind chooses to throw out the ugly and the bad and automatically blocks bad memories; it works as an automatic defense mechanism. This is all very well and I'm glad the mind works the way it does but I'm still left with a couple of nagging questions as to what's real and what's not.
No comments:
Post a Comment