What are Repressed Memories and are they real?

This video describes the concept of repressed memories and the defense mechanism of repression. Repression is one of the defense mechanisms theorized by Sigmund Freud when he created psychoanalytic theory, which is a talk therapy modality. In psychoanalytic theory, the ego regulates the unconscious drives of the id and the morals and societal values of the superego. When the ego fails to regulate the id and the superego sometimes defense mechanisms can be observed. One of those defense mechanisms is repression and arguably it's the most important defense mechanism because every defense mechanism has repression reflected in it in some way. To understand repression we have to understand the idea of the conscious, preconscious, and unconscious mind. The conscious mind contains information that we are aware of right now. The preconscious mind stores more information that we have access to but we are not thinking of at the moment. That information can be retrieved. The unconscious mind contains the most information and it's information that we are not aware of we can't retrieve. With repression, frightening and painful memories, thoughts, or unconscious drives that are unacceptable get pushed from conscious awareness or from the preconscious mind to the unconscious mind. By definition someone cannot recall a repressed memory. They are not aware of the information that is stored away securely in the unconscious mind. On this issue of the existence of repressed memories, most therapists believe that this phenomenon is true (about 70%). Most researchers don't believe it's true with only around 15 - 30% believing that repressed memories are real. There are a number of alternative explanations to repressed memories, however, research in this area is difficult to conduct. There is no way currently of proving or disproving the concept of repressed memories.

Видео What are Repressed Memories and are they real? канала Dr. Todd Grande