Recovered Memories

Improved Essays
Television shows such as Law and Order: SVU have brought the concept of repressed and recovered memories to pop culture. Repressed and recovered memories can be described as memories of traumatic events from childhood, that is forgotten then recalled later in life. This is a controversial topic in the mental health community; with the draw surrounding the validity of these memories. Working with doctors and researchers, judges within the court circuits must pick a position to get the justice deserved. The psychology field has debated about the concept of repressed and recovered memories. The biggest contest comes from two major standpoints: repressed memories are a safety mechanism by the body or that they are implanted by an outside source (Geraerts, 2009). The strongest side seems to come for the “debunking” of this medical phenomenon. It has been shown many times of therapists …show more content…
Believers understand that memories are pushed away as a survival mechanism, and therapeutic assets assist in finding them; not simply creating them. Eileen Franklin’s case proves this. Over the course, Eileen’s memories came back. It was instantaneous as people believe. Instead, it came from similar instances to the main event and came back in pieces. Her memories were so vivid and detailed it led to the arrest of her father for the murder of a young child (Loftus, 1993). Regarding child sexual abuse, the FIA test had shown that those who had spontaneous memory recovery, had no evidence of false recall (Geraerts, 2009). A second experiment had resulted in the evidence that memories recalled within therapy were corroborated by evidence (Gerarets, 2007). Advisories to repressed memories believe that those who experience this should be shocked by what information has come to light. However, outside factors associated with the abuse may not be a surprise (Gerarets, 2007). It instead confirms an underlying

Related Documents

  • Improved Essays

    Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is classified as a subcategory of anxiety disorders, a stress response caused by a catastrophically traumatizing event that is outside the range of usual human experience. PTSD is what Lacy Johnson was diagnosed as having after experiencing her traumatizing incident. In Lacy M. Johnson’s memoir, The Other Side, Johnson recounts the terrifying story of being kidnapped and raped by her abusive partner and struggling to recover from the incident. Johnson describes to her readers of going through everyday life while being haunted by the memories of the man who she calls “The man I used to live with.” The only way to help Johnson would be by giving her the gift of forgetting her abuser.…

    • 143 Words
    • 1 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Decent Essays

    Elizabeth Loftus Accused

    • 137 Words
    • 1 Pages

    To begin, I do not believe that repressed memories should be allowed for use in court to prosecute the alleged abuser. After reading the article by Elizabeth Loftus, I came to this conclusion because memories have the ability to be manipulated and abused, which studies and analysis's have proven. For example, some professionals contain the ability to provide false memories in which the manipulated person never experienced. The court system could be working with material that has no substantial value what so ever for the prosecution of the abuser. Therefore, I strongly believe the gathered resources to prosecute someone should be accountable or proven information instead of just memories.…

    • 137 Words
    • 1 Pages
    Decent Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Hypnosis has been used in the past to help people recover certain memories. The memories recovered have used in court cases as evidence and verdicts made based on the memories; however, are these memories accurate? Should they be used in court cases as true and accurate memories? In the case study Accuracy of Recall by Hypnotically Age-Regressed Subjects, these questions are answered. Overall, the memories recovered using hypnosis are inaccurate.…

    • 407 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Memory In The Scarlet Ibis

    • 1146 Words
    • 5 Pages

    Memory can be twisted based on grief and guilt. A good example of this is in “The Scarlet Ibis”, by James Hurst. The story is written as a memory of the protagonist’s brother Doodle. The events that play out make it really easy to blame Brother for Doodle’s death, and make it harder to analyze him because we only know him in relation to the memories and events he is recalling. He points out all he things he did wrong, this makes it where the readers will most likely leave the story with a negative impression of him, and forget that he was just a child when all this happened.…

    • 1146 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    rather than a baby. By forcing him to remember what happened, the psychologist helped Dr. Pierce to recover. “The notion that trauma “is not locatable in the simple violent or original event in an individual’s past, but rather in the way that its very unassimilated nature—the way it was precisely not known in the first instance—returns to haunt the survivor later on. However, even as it is unavailable for conscious inspection, the memory of the event returns later to express itself repeatedly in hallucinations, flashbacks, nightmares, and/or nervous disorders, especially in circumstances reminiscent of the original experience.”…

    • 560 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    A very interesting topic, repressed memories. A topic that is complex and very hard to proove and yet hard to discredit. While I am sure this is a situation that does happen, it probably is less common than has been reported. The main focus in this article seems to be oriented around child abuse memories being repressed.…

    • 388 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Great Essays

    Forgetting is something that one does purposely. It is a negative experience. The apparent inconsistency may be explained by examining the mechanism involved in retrieval-induced forgetting. Anderson and his colleagues (Anderson et al., 1994; Anderson & Spellman, 1995) conclude that retrieval-induced forgetting results from the suppression of selected-against responses. There may be interrogation techniques that can ameliorate the effects of retrieval-induced forgetting.…

    • 1572 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Great Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Data showed that even when RIF in children is present, it might be a short-lived phenomenon if the related memories are of details that occurred in the same day. The more applicable condition of having events occur over multiple days and a long delay condition showed effects of retrieval-induced forgetting. This is important to consider because it could be a forgetting mechanism that children use when recalling repeated victimization. The risks associated with partial retrieval must be considered when retrieval strategies are developed for…

    • 1382 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Great Essays

    Introduction What follows is a short summary of the journal article Recovering Memories of Trauma: A View From the Laboratory, written by Richard McNally of Harvard University and published by the Association for Psychological Science. I will then consider under what circumstances repressed memories are likely to surface, what are the possible effects and offer my personal beliefs about my own mind repressing painful memories. Literature Review Mr. McNally begins his paper by pointing to the controversy over the recovering of memories of childhood sexual abuse and the scarcity of data regarding the cognitive functioning of these individuals. While he accepts that past horrendous experiences impress themselves upon the mind and that it defends itself by repressing these events, the use of different…

    • 928 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Great Essays
  • Great Essays

    Repressed Memory Analysis

    • 1382 Words
    • 6 Pages

    Excerpt from Jason Nier’s Taking Sides: Clashing views in social pscyhology The purpose the article by Kluft & Loftus(2007) was to explore the opposing points of view in the debate about whether recovering memory repressed memory is plausible. This is relevant to the fields of law and psychology because there are many time in cases where people report recovering a memory they repressed and the courts must decide whether or not to believe them. Kluft supports his position that repressed memory is real by detailing cases he had over the course of his career.…

    • 1382 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Great Essays
  • Improved Essays

    In a Harvard study on people who have long withheld tramas, it is questioned whether or not memories can be created so strongly that the person in question will get PTSD like symptoms. One of several patients is a man who claimed to be an alien abductee; he listened to a recording of how he was abducted, which in turn triggered psychological responses similar to that in combat veterans. The memory that this person believed however wasn’t true, it was something that their memory created from experiences and stories that they had previously heard (Neimark). The participants in this study who held false memories showed different characteristics than those who did not. The people who were affected by false memories in this study had a higher ability for fantasy and absorption than the normal person; this is the ability to become entranced or more often daydream (Neimark).…

    • 972 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Great Essays

    False Memories

    • 1691 Words
    • 7 Pages

    False Memories: Investigating the Reliability of Human Memory Jordan Asnicar University of Queensland Memory plays a fundamental role in our everyday lives. Our ability to absorb, store and recall information, as we need it, is integral to how we understand and navigate the world. Most people consider their memory to be reliable however memory is malleable and is often manipulated by a range of factors that we’re not aware of (Laney & Loftus, 2013). Psychological studies have revealed both the tendency for memories to deteriorate (Zhu et al., 2011) and how the brain can be manipulated into creating false memories (Laney & Loftus, 2013). These false memories have the potential to be pervasive in the justice system and could…

    • 1691 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Great Essays
  • Great Essays

    False Memory Theory

    • 1825 Words
    • 8 Pages

    The need to understand the memory processes has been in the scope of discovering the potential of the brain and also in the scope of developing therapies to heal memory problems. Numerous theories therefore have been developed to explain various memory processes situations. For example, there is a theory in the scope of false memories that works to situations where individuals can possess definite memories with regard to particular event that did not occur to them in the real sense (Schooler, 1998). The above is to mean that individuals can have false memories in the scope of thinking or assuming that they have been in certain situations or places. In scientific terms, the theory is viewed to be the result of errors of commission as opposed to the errors of omission.…

    • 1825 Words
    • 8 Pages
    Great Essays
  • Great Essays

    Recovered memories are memories that were repressed but recovered during hypnosis or psychotherapy. False memories are memories that are distorted or imagined. There is no way to differentiate between the recovered memory to be true or false. However, some cases use a recovered memory to convict sexual abusers and send them to jail (pgs. 208-209). 2.…

    • 2112 Words
    • 9 Pages
    Great Essays
  • Superior Essays

    Benefruence And Nonmaleficence In Counseling

    • 986 Words
    • 4 Pages
    • 3 Works Cited

    It is unclear in this case if the counselor obtained consent to share information with the father or the extent to which information was allowed to be shared. The client has the right to place limits of the amount of confidential information she wants shared with her father (Koocher & Keith-Spiegel, 2008). If consent was obtained, the counselor did not breach confidentiality by sharing information with the father, however, she acted unethically by not considering how this accusation could harm the father, who was also her client. As her client, the father has the same rights as his daughter.…

    • 986 Words
    • 4 Pages
    • 3 Works Cited
    Superior Essays