On repressed memory
I read a novel a few years back by Dan Chaon, a creative writing professor at Oberlin College. It is called Ill Will and deals with a psychologist caught up in a familial drama involving repressed memory of youthful violence and devil worship. Here are some lines from the book: “Back in the late eighties and early nineties… my professor, Dr. Raskoph, was an an authority on recovered-memory syndrome, dissociative identity disorder… There had been doubt that Satanic Ritual Abuse… was real and true phenomenon… If the memories were not literally true, then they represented distorted versions of traumas that had truly occurred.”
The novel’s narrator goes on to say an eminent university professor argued repressed-memory theory was a myth. I read a bit about it, including a book by a Harvard professor who said basically the same thing: that, if anything, trauma victims are more likely to sharply remember what happened to them than to forget it.
I am not a psychiatrist but disagree. I think some people with a certain psychological condition who are lied to by their communities can block memories of what happened to them for a very long time. Communities can lie.