Repressed Memories

Some individuals go through experiences that are genuinely traumatic — experiences that emotionally hurt a person in a lasting way. Sigmund Freud proposed that such experiences are pushed, or repressed, into the unconscious mind, where they become unavailable for ordinary retrieval. This form of repression specifically holds painful, threatening, or embarrassing memories out of conscious awareness rather than simply letting them fade.

In some people, traumatic experiences can give rise to a form of psychological amnesia. Certain individuals faced with an overwhelming crisis find themselves utterly unable to cope with what has happened, and they respond by closing their eyes, ears, and mind to the harsh reality in front of them — essentially taking mental flight from it. Taken to an extreme, this can result in highly generalised amnesia. One outcome of such extreme mental flight is a disorder known as the fugue state, in which a person assumes an entirely new identity, name, and address; such a person effectively carries two personalities, and the personality in charge at a given time has no awareness of the other. …