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.

The past is never dead. It’s not even past. Faulkner (1950/2011 , p. 73)

More than 20 years ago, Crews (1995) coined the term “memory wars” to refer to a contentious debate regarding the existence of repressed memories, which refers to memories that become inaccessible for conscious inspection because of an active process known as repression. This debate raged throughout the 1990s and was widely assumed to have subsided in the new millennium. A number of prominent authors who were skeptical of repressed memories (e.g., Barden, 2016; McHugh, 2003; Paris, 2012) declared the memory wars to be effectively over, essentially arguing that most researchers and clinicians now understand that believing in such memories without reservation is at best questionable scientifically. The argument among these authors is essentially that the recovered-memory skeptics won. Others argue that the memory wars have been resolved in the opposite direction, stating that there is now better evidence for a trauma-dissociation model and less room for a skeptical stance toward repressed (dissociated; see below) memories (Dalenberg et al., 2012). Some proponents of the idea of dissociative amnesia (i.e., the inability to remember autobiographic experiences usually as a result of trauma) have even likened skeptics to climate-science deniers (Brand et al., 2018, in response to Merckelbach & Patihis, 2018). Their argument appears to be that they have won the memory wars, and further proof of this is the continued inclusion of dissociative amnesia in the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM–5; American Psychiatric Association, 2013; see also Spiegel et al., 2011).

In this article, we present evidence that the debate concerning repressed memories is by no means dead. To the contrary, we contend that it rages on today and that the term dissociative amnesia is being used as a substitute term for repressed memory. To buttress this point, we present converging lines of evidence from several sources suggesting that the concept of repressed memories has not vanished and that it has merely reappeared in numerous guises (e.g., in the context of dissociative amnesia). Admittedly, some researchers have argued that the memory wars have persisted (e.g., Patihis, Ho, Tingen, Lilienfeld, & Loftus, 2014), but no review has systematically and critically evaluated this proposition. In this article, we amass evidence from multiple sources showing that beliefs associated with repressed memories and related topics such as dissociative amnesia, far from being extinguished, as claimed by some scholars, remain very much alive today. Furthermore, we demonstrate that these beliefs carry significant risks in clinical and legal settings.

Conclusion The claims of some authors to the contrary, the controversial topic of repressed memories and dissociative amnesia continues to be very much alive in clinical, legal, and academic contexts. Converging lines of evidence suggest that concerns regarding the widespread belief in repressed memories are far from having been resolved following the memory wars of the 1990s. Across many different professionals (e.g., psychotherapists), the percentage who believe in repressed memories remains high, generally above 50%. Furthermore, the idea of repressed memories has merely become popular under a different name—dissociative amnesia—which shares many characteristics with repressed memory and that carries the added cachet of being associated with the DSM–5 (American Psychiatric Association, 2013). In addition, research points to the possibility that some therapeutic techniques exert adverse effects by potentially increasing the likelihood of false memories. Finally, questions of repressed memories continue to be addressed in the courtroom and in the scientific literature. Taken together, these different threads of evidence imply that falsely recovered memories of abuse continue to pose a substantial risk in therapeutic settings, potentially leading to false accusations and associated miscarriages of justice. A relevant question is how flawed ideas regarding the functioning of memory could be corrected. That unconscious repressed memory is still accepted with little qualification and remains popular among many mental-health professionals can be explained in part by the now well-replicated finding that it is typically difficult to correct erroneous beliefs. Specifically, when people are confronted with any form of misinformation (e.g., fake news), correcting such errors is challenging, a phenomenon referred to as the continued-influence effect (Lewandowsky, Ecker, Seifert, Schwarz, & Cook, 2012; see also Lilienfeld, Marshall, Todd, & Shane, 2014) or belief perseverance (C. A. Anderson, Lepper, & Ross, 1980). However, recent studies suggest that informing people that their firmly held beliefs are incorrect (“prebunking”), and even providing them with the correct alternative information (debunking), can often be effective in correcting these beliefs (e.g., Blank & Launay, 2014; Crozier & Strange, 2019). In addition to applying these provisional but promising methods, it is crucially important to educate individuals, especially legal professionals and clinicians, about the science of memory. This effort is all the more essential given that these professionals are often in close contact with victims, patients, witnesses, and suspects. Such interactions are a prime opportunity for inadvertent memory contamination. Increasing their awareness of potentially harmful beliefs about repressed memories should therefore be a priority in clinical and legal work as well as for psychological scientists at large.

Action Editor

Laura A. King served as action editor for this article. ORCID iDs

Henry Otgaar https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2782-2181 Lawrence Patihis https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2870-8986 Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared that there were no conflicts of interest with respect to the authorship or the publication of this article.

Notes 1.

We use the term false memory in this article to refer to the remembrance of events/details that did not occur (e.g., Loftus, 2005). 2.

On the website of the Journal of Trauma & Dissociation, we looked for articles using the search term “dissociative amnesia” from January 2010 to May 2019 and from January 1990 to May 1999. 3.

In the reviewed studies, confidence was measured using different rating scales (e.g., 1–5, 1–10, 50–100). 4.

We explored whether the rise of these terms is also evident when controlling for the total number of cases in the Dutch legal database. From 2001 to 2010, there were a total of 192,345 cases, and from 2011 to 2018 there were a total of 267,377 cases. Even if these base rates were taken into account, we found that the terms recovered memory (9 × 10−5 to 1.2 × 10−4) and dissociative amnesia (7 × 10−5 to 1 × 10−4) increased from 2001 to 2010 to 2011 to 2018.