Repression: Active Censorship of Stressful Memories vs. Source Amnesia for Self-Consciously Dissociated Memories

Abstract

Three groups of subjects were presented solvable and unsolvable anagrams, along with clues that were either perceived or imaged. For the two groups in which failure was made stressful, the perceptual clues from failed anagrams were most likely to be misremembered as imaginal clues. This finding suggests that the repression of past failure is manifested primarily as source amnesia, and is a passive aftereffect of having dissociatively experienced failure as “not real” as well as not imaginary in source. Such a suggestion challenges two key Freudian assumptions: that repression is universal, and that it entails active censorship.