Can Memories of Childhood Sexual Abuse Be Repressed and Then Recovered? infographic description

The infographic is titled, Thinking Critically About: Can Memories of Childhood Sexual Abuse Be Repressed and Then Recovered? The learning objective question 8-17 reads, why have reports of repressed and recovered memories been so hotly debated?

The main heading reads, Two Possible Tragedies:

The first panel text reads, Number 1. People doubt childhood sexual abuse survivors who tell their secret.

The second panel text reads, Number 2. Innocent people are falsely accused, as therapists prompt open quotes recovered close quotes memories of childhood sexual abuse.

In this panel, there is an illustration of a client sitting on a chair with her knees drawn up under her chin. On the other side of this panel is an image of a therapist looking at the client. The therapist says, “Victims of sexual abuse often have your symptoms. So maybe you were abused and repressed the memory. Let’s see if I can help you recover the memory, by digging back and visualizing your trauma”.

Thought bubbles from the client’s head lead to the next panel which has a series of thought bubbles. The first thought bubble shows a blurred image of a man. Text below reads, Misinformation effect and source amnesia: Adult client may form image of threatening person. Then, a right-facing arrow points to a thought bubble with a clearer image of the man with the caption, with rehearsal (repeated therapy sessions), the image grows more vivid. Another right-facing arrow points to an image of a dismayed client’s face. The caption reads, Client is stunned, angry, and ready to confront or sue the remembered abuser. The last right-facing arrow points to a clear image of a man looking very sad, with his hand up. The caption reads, Accused person is equally stunned and vigorously denies the accusation of long-ago abuse.

In the next panel, text reads as follows: Professional organizations (including the American Medical, American Psychological, and American Psychiatric Associations) are working to find sensible common ground to resolve psychology’s open quotes memory war close quotes (Patihis et al., 2014a).

A bulleted list below reads as follows:

1. Childhood sexual abuse happens and can leave its victims at risk for problems ranging from sexual dysfunction to depression (Freyd et al., 2007). But there is no open quotes survivor syndrome close quotes—no group of symptoms that lets us spot victims of sexual abuse (Kendall-Tackett et al., 1993).
2. Injustice happens Innocent people have been falsely convicted. And guilty people have avoided punishment by casting doubt on their truth-telling accusers.
3. Forgetting happens Children abused when very young may not have understood the meaning of their experience or remember it. Forgetting long-ago good and bad events is an ordinary part of everyday life.
4. Recovered memories are common Cued by a remark or an experience, we may recover pleasant or unpleasant memories of long-forgotten events. But does the unconscious mind forcibly repress painful experiences, and can these experiences be recovered by therapist-aided techniques? (McNally and Geraerts, 2009). Memories that surface naturally are more likely to be true (Geraerts et al., 2007).
5. Memories of events before age 4 are unreliable. Infantile amnesia results from not yet developed brain pathways. Most psychologists therefore doubt open quotes recovered closed quotes memories of abuse during infancy (Gore-Felton et al., 2000; Knapp and VandeCreek, 2000). The older a child was when suffering sexual abuse, and the more severe the abuse, the more likely it is to be remembered (Goodman et al., 2003).
6. Memories open quotes recovered close quotes under hypnosis are especially unreliable.
7. Memories, whether real or false, can be emotionally upsetting. What was born of mere suggestion can become, like an actual event, a stinging memory that drives bodily stress (McNally, 2003, 2007).

Psychologists question whether repression ever occurs. (See Chapter 14 for more on this concept, which is central to Freud’s theory).

Traumatic experiences (witnessing a loved one's murder, being terrorized by a hijacker or rapist, losing everything in a natural disaster) typically lead to vivid, persistent, haunting memories (Porter and Peace, 2007; Goldfarb et al., 2019).

The Royal College of Psychiatrists Working Group on Reported Recovered Memories of Child Sexual Abuse advised that “when memories are ‘recovered' after long periods of amnesia, particularly when extraordinary means were used to secure the recovery of memory, there is a high probability that the memories are false (Brandon et al., 1998)."