ReviewPerspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science2019
The Return of the Repressed: The Persistent and Problematic Claims of Long-Forgotten Trauma.
Review in Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 31 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
31 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 177 citations in OpenAlex.
- The recovery and retraction of memories of abuse: a scoping review.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Pooled it
- Creating true and false memories from forgotten information in Drosophila.Nature neuroscience · 2026Article
- Retrosplenial cortical reorganization during late adolescence introduces instability of contextual memory circuits.PLoS biology · 2026Article
- Evaluating the evidence for repressed memory recovery in psychedelic contexts.Psychopharmacology · 2026Review
- Rebuttal to "Questioning the recovery of dissociated traumatic memories under psilocybin".Journal of eating disorders · 2026Article
- On post-traumatic stress disorder and the accessibility of memories: traumatic memories in refugees and asylum seekers.Psychiatry, psychology, and law : an interdisciplinary journal of the Australian and New Zealand Association of Psychiatry, Psychology and Law · 2026Article
- Judicial assessment of testimonial reliability after EMDR therapy: a case-series analysis.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- Current state of 'lost in the mall': implications for expert witness testimony on the reliability of childhood memories.Psychiatry, psychology, and law : an interdisciplinary journal of the Australian and New Zealand Association of Psychiatry, Psychology and Law · 2026Article
- Questioning the recovery of dissociated traumatic memories under psilocybin: comment on "Therapeutic emergence of dissociated traumatic memories during psilocybin treatment for anorexia nervosa".Journal of eating disorders · 2025Article
- Examining the effects of mood and emotional valence on the creation of false autobiographical memories.Memory & cognition · 2025Article
- Retrosplenial Cortical Reorganization During Late Adolescence Introduces Instability of Episodic Memory Circuits.Research square · 2025Article
- In a UK sample, EMDR and other trauma therapists indicate beliefs in unconscious repression and dissociative amnesia.Memory (Hove, England) · 2025Article
- Exploring the metamnemonic and phenomenal differences between transitional and mundane events.Memory & cognition · 2024Article
- Long-lasting negativity in the left motoric brain structures during word memory inhibition in the Think/No-Think paradigm.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- False memories in forensic psychology: do cognition and brain activity tell the same story?Frontiers in psychology · 2024Review
- Time heals all wounds? Naïve theories about the fading of affect associated with autobiographical events.Memory & cognition · 2023Article
- Narrative Review of the Complex Interaction between Pain and Trauma in Children: A Focus on Biological Memory, Preclinical Data, and Epigenetic Processes.Children (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Review
- Subjective Reactions to First Coitus in Relation to Participant Sex, Partner Age, and Context in a German Nationally Representative Sample of Adolescents and Young Adults.Archives of sexual behavior · 2023Article
- External and internal influences yield similar memory effects: the role of deception and suggestion.Frontiers in psychology · 2023Review
- Recovered memories of trauma as a special (or not so special) form of involuntary autobiographical memories.Frontiers in psychology · 2023Review
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Authors and funding
7 authors at 6 institutions in 5 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Can purely psychological trauma lead to a complete blockage of autobiographical memories? This long-standing question about the existence of repressed memories has been at the heart of one of the most heated debates in modern psychology. These so-called memory wars originated in the 1990s, and many scholars have assumed that they are over. We demonstrate that this assumption is incorrect and that the controversial issue of repressed memories is alive and well and may even be on the rise. We review converging research and data from legal cases indicating that the topic of repressed memories remains active in clinical, legal, and academic settings. We show that the belief in repressed memories occurs on a nontrivial scale (58%) and appears to have increased among clinical psychologists since the 1990s. We also demonstrate that the scientifically controversial concept of dissociative amnesia, which we argue is a substitute term for memory repression, has gained in popularity. Finally, we review work on the adverse side effects of certain psychotherapeutic techniques, some of which may be linked to the recovery of repressed memories. The memory wars have not vanished. They have continued to endure and contribute to potentially damaging consequences in clinical, legal, and academic contexts.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.