Imagine an experience so terrible that the memory of the event is blocked completely. This is the idea behind repressed memory; and according to Bartol and Bartol, authors of Psychology and Law: Theory, Research, and Application, some experiences affect humans so deeply that their own mind blocks it from consciousness.

Repressed memory is commonly seen in cases of child abuse, where the victim claims that the memories from their childhood “come back" to them as an adult, sometimes the result of therapy. The debate over whether repressed memory should be admissible in court has been waging for some time now.

Scientific View of Repressed Memory

What does the science have to say about repressed memories? It was once thought that acquiring, retaining and retrieving memories was a passive process. But in 1997, M. Smith, author of an article titled "The recovered memory/false memory debate," found that this process is actually a very active one. In short, the human brain actually chooses what to remember.

Further, Elizabeth Loftus, a noted authority on repressed memory research and author of the articles "The price of bad memories" and "Memory in Canadian courts of law," has found that remembering something has been found to not just be a simple matter of “recalling” it; humans apply both their memory and everything they have seen and heard since the event in constructing what actually happened. This means that memories are easily distorted without people even being aware it is happening.

So when it comes to repressed memory, the question must be asked, are these events truly being lost from consciousness, forgotten, and then later, often after many years, remembered? The short answer is "no." Science has failed, despite vast anecdotal evidence, to prove that repressed memory even exists.

Legal View of Repressed Memory

Countless people would argue that repressed memory does, indeed exist, however. People have gone to jail based on someone else's repressed memory in some cases. Despite J. Boakes assertion in his 1998 article "Psychology astray: Fallacies in studies on "repressed memory" and childhood trauma" of there being no real scientific evidence that repressed memory even exists, the law will arrest, try and convict people based on little else in some cases.

Victims who claim they have repressed memories will argue passionately and emotionally that the events of their past did happen and must have been “forgotten” because they were so terrible. J. D. Read, D. A. Connolly and A. Welsh in their 2006 study "An archival analysis of actual casesof historic child sexual abuse: A comparison of jury and bench trials" found that repressed memory as evidence has a significant effect on judge's and juries decisions in cases of child sexual abuse. While it is easy to dismiss these claims under the shelter of “but science says 'no,'” it is clear that there is more to repressed memory than science has been able to reveal thus far.

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