A Bad Trip Down Memory Lane

Rare is the academic field in which colleagues on opposite sides of
a debate — people with international reputations — dismiss the very
foundations of one another’s work. One such field, according to Susan Clancy
of the Harvard Psychology Department, is the area of false or repressed
memory.

What the two sides disagree on is whether painful memories of traumatic
events can actually be repressed — completely forgotten — and then ”recovered”
years later in therapy. Many clinicians say yes: it is how we instinctively
protect ourselves from childhood recollections that would otherwise be
too dire to bear. Most cognitive psychologists say no: real trauma is almost
never forgotten; full-blown, traumatic memories dredged up decades later
through hypnosis are almost invariably false.

The discussion has profound implications in fields as diverse as child abuse and alien abductions.

from the New York Times