How do psychologists deal with repressed memories of child sexual abuse? What are the techniques used by psychologists in court to recover the memories in court?

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Answers may vary.Retrieving memories over short time periods, as eyewitnesses must do, is a complex task. Yet it pales in comparison with retrieving memories that have been stored, and in some cases, forgotten, over lengthy intervals. Two basic processes need to be distinguished in understanding long-lost memories. The first is natural forgetting, which tends to occur when people simply do not think about events that happened years earlier. Just as you might have trouble remembering the name of your fourth-grade teacher, witnesses to crimes, accidents, and business transactions are likely to forget the details of these events, if not the entire event, after the passage of months or years. Such forgetting or misremembering is even more likely when the event is confused with prior or subsequent experiences that bear some resemblance to it. No one disputes the reality of natural forgetting. Much more controversial is a second type of lost "memory"-the memories that are presumed to have been repressed over long time periods. This process involves events that are thought to be so traumatizing that individuals bury them deeply in their unconscious mind through a process of emotionally motivated forgetting called repression.A related unconscious process is dissociation, in which victims of abuse or other traumas are thought to escape the full impact of an experience by psychologically detaching themselves from it. This process is believed to be particularly strong in children, who, because they are still forming integrated personalities, find it easier to escape from the pain of abuse by fantasizing about made-up individuals and imagining that the abuse is happening to those others. Many clinical psychologists believe that such early episodes of dissociation, involving unique ideas, feelings, and behavior, form the beginning of the altered personalities that are found in dissociative identity disorder.Most of the reports of repressed and recovered memories involve claims of CSA. The theory is that individuals (1) suffered sexual or physical abuse as children, often at the hands of parents or other trusted adults; (2) repressed or dissociated any memory of these horrors for many years as a form of unconscious protection; and (3) recovered their long-lost memories of the abuse when it was psychologically safe to do so. A widely cited study suggests that it may be possible for people to forget horrible events that happened to them in childhood. Williams interviewed 129 women who had experienced well-documented cases of CSA. She asked detailed questions about the abuse experiences, which occurred at an average of 17 years earlier.