Should we erase painful memories?

Sat, 31 Dec 2011 21:00:00 +0000

One of the most tenacious themes of 20th-century memory research was the idea that people tormented by the memories of terrible experiences could benefit from remembering them, and from remembering them better. The assumption — broadly indebted to psychoanalysis — was that psychological records of traumatic events often failed to be fully “integrated” into conscious memories. As long as these records remained “dissociated,” the sufferer was compelled to “relive” them instead of benignly remembering them. The more fully and appropriately one remembered terrible events, the more attenuated would be their emotional power.

But in the 1990s — a time when psychoanalytic assumptions were being challenged as never before — neuroscience researchers developed a new framework for thinking about remembering, forgetting, and the mind’s record of past events. One result was a highly controversial new paradigm for treating traumatic memories. The problem with bad memories, these new researchers claimed, is not their complex and unresolved relation to one’s sense of self, but the simple fact that they are unpleasant. These researchers defined emotional memory not in terms of repressed ideas, but by certain patterns of neuron action and the chemical changes they triggered. The next step was to change these patterns.

Salon.com > Alison Winter

Should we erase painful memories?