Erdelyi (2006) in BBS.pdf

BEHAVIORAL AND BRAIN SCIENCES (2006) 29, 499–551

Printed in the United States of America

The uniﬁed theory of repression

Matthew Hugh Erdelyi

Department of Psychology, Brooklyn College and the Graduate School,

The City University of New York, Brooklyn, NY 11210-2889

iyledre@patmedia.net

Abstract: Repression has become an empirical fact that is at once obvious and problematic. Fragmented clinical and laboratory

traditions and disputed terminology have resulted in a Babel of misunderstandings in which false distinctions are imposed (e.g.,

between repression and suppression) and necessary distinctions not drawn (e.g., between the mechanism and the use to which it is

put, defense being just one). “Repression” was introduced by Herbart to designate the (nondefensive) inhibition of ideas by other

ideas in their struggle for consciousness. Freud adapted repression to the defensive inhibition of “unbearable” mental contents.

Substantial experimental literatures on attentional biases, thought avoidance, interference, and intentional forgetting exist, the

oldest prototype being the work of Ebbinghaus, who showed that intentional avoidance of memories results in their progressive

forgetting over time. It has now become clear, as clinicians had claimed, that the inaccessible materials are often available and

emerge indirectly (e.g., procedurally, implicitly). It is also now established that the Ebbinghaus retention function can be partly

reversed, with resulting increases of conscious memory over time ( hypermnesia ). Freud’s clinical experience revealed early on that

exclusion from consciousness was effected not just by simple repression (inhibition) but also by a variety of distorting techniques,

some deployed to degrade latent contents ( denial ), all eventually subsumed under the rubric of defense mechanisms (“repression in

the widest sense”). Freudian and Bartlettian distortions are essentially the same, even in name, except for motive (cognitive vs.

emotional), and experimentally induced false memories and other “memory illusions” are laboratory analogs of self-induced distortions.

Keywords: avoidance; Bartlett; defense; denial; distortion; Ebbinghaus; false-memories; Freud; inhibition; repression; suppression

1. Introduction

transformations and false additions. These two subclasses

of memory degradation subsume most of the classic clini-

cal manifestations of repression and, critically, are exten-

sively buttressed, as shown in Sections 4 (on inhibition)

and 5 (on elaborative distortions), by the experimental

literature. Consequently, a viable uniﬁed framework

for repression is afforded.

Repression has been a puzzle for scientiﬁc psychology. It is

not clear to many, even at this date, whether repression is

best regarded as an obvious fact of mental life or an out-

right (and even dangerous) myth. In this article I sketch

out a theory of repression that integrates the largely disso-

ciated data of the clinic and the laboratory into a uniﬁed

framework that is simple, rich – and right.

The article is organized into four sections besides this

Introduction. First, in a historical analysis (sect. 2), I

show that the classic conception of repression, from

Herbart to Freud, is consistent with modern laboratory

research, but that confusion has resulted from a semantic

distortion introduced, ironically, by Anna Freud, who

insisted that repression needed to be an unconscious

process, its conscious counterpart being “suppression.”

Sigmund Freud, actually, used repression and suppression

interchangeably and insisted on “the unity of mental life”

across the conscious–unconscious continuum, so that

“repression” could be both conscious and unconscious.

The historical analysis is thought to be important

because it dissolves much of the controversy surrounding

repression. Building on this historical foundation, the third

section articulates the uniﬁed theory of repression that is

being proposed. Repression, conceived of as a class of

consciousness-lowering processes, is divided into two sub-

classes, inhibitory and elaborative processes. Inhibitory

(or simple ) repression involves cognitive avoidance (not-

thinking) of some target material and leads to loss of acces-

sible memory. Some of the lost memory may, however,

express itself indirectly and may be partially recovered

with subsequent retrieval effort. Elaborative repression

distorts the original memory through a variety of

2. History and deﬁnition of repression, including

distortions of the concept

Although traditionally associated with Freud, the term as

well as basic concept of repression was introduced into

psychology more than half a century before the advent

of psychoanalysis by one of the founders of scientiﬁc

M ATTHEW E RDELYI was born in Budapest, Hungary,

lived in Venezuela for several years, and ﬁnally settled

in the United States, where he obtained his Ph.D. at

Yale. He speaks no language without an accent. He is

Professor of Psychology and formerly the Stern Pro-

fessor of Humor at Brooklyn College, City University

of New York. Erdelyi has pursued experimental and

theoretical work on subliminal perception, the recovery

of inaccessible memories, and psychodynamics. Along

with many articles, he has published two books,

Psychoanalysis: Freud’s Cognitive Psychology (1985)

and The Recovery of Unconscious Memories: Hyperm-

nesia and Reminiscence (1996). He has been a visiting

scholar at various universities and was a Fellow at the

Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences

in Stanford.

# 2006 Cambridge University Press

0140-525x/06 $12.50

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Erdelyi: The uniﬁed theory of repression

psychology, Johann Herbart (1824–1825), to designate

the inhibition of ideas by other ideas. Herbart’s “repres-

sion” was not a defensive repression. It is important to dis-

tinguish between the mechanism and the defense

(Anderson & Green 2001; Erdelyi 1993). The mechanism

is the basic process; the defense is the use to which the

mechanism is put – and there could be many uses other

than defense. For Herbart, repression was a necessary

consequence of the limited capacity of consciousness. By

being aware of one idea, we necessarily foreclose being

aware of another idea. According to Herbart, the inhibited

ideas do not cease to exist but pass into a “state of

tendency” – the philosophically correct term of those

days for “unconscious” – and fall below the “threshold of

consciousness.” The repressed ideas can, with changed

circumstances or in recombinations, overthrow the

ideas currently in consciousness and repress them in turn.

Freud, who was inﬂuenced by Herbart, at least

indirectly (see Sand 1988), also maintained that repressed

ideas do not cease to exist. Later in this article I examine

some experimental data that bear on this controversial

assumption. Even before the creation of psychoanalysis,

while he was still tinkering with hypnotherapy and cathar-

sis, Freud already espoused the notion of defensive repres-

sion (though “repression” was not the ﬁrst term he used),

hewing to a model of mind reminiscent of Herbart’s

dynamic model of consciousness. Freud parted with the

reigning philosophical assumption of his day that the

mind was coterminous with consciousness – as we know,

consciousness became for Freud, as it has now become

for scientiﬁc psychology, a mere tip of the psychological

iceberg – and conceived of the conﬂict unfolding on a

deeper plane: Psychological subsystems, not all accessible

to consciousness, were in conﬂict with each other and tried

to inhibit the operation and accessibility of the other.

Some years before The Interpretation of Dreams (Freud

1900/1953), which for many marks the beginning of psy-

choanalysis, Freud (1892–1893/1966) published a

two-part case history of a patient who was having problems

breast-feeding her baby. Freud sketched out a dynamic

formulation of the woman’s problem. She was conceived

to be in conﬂict – without being aware of the conﬂict:

She both wished and did not wish to breast-feed her

child. Because awareness of her reluctance would have

been painful to her, she “inhibited the antithetic idea”

(the reluctance to breast-feed) and “dissociated” it from

her awareness. The antithetic idea does not thereby

get abolished but “establishes itself, so to speak, as a

‘ counter-will ’, while the patient is aware with astonishment

of having a will which is resolute but powerless” (p. 122).

The terms dissociated and inhibited were soon joined by

repression and suppression in Breuer and Freud’s (1893/

1955) “Preliminary Communications,” which became the

ﬁrst section of their 1895 classic, Studies on Hysteria (in

my view, the effective starting point of psychoanalysis).

In this work Freud and Breuer write:

the function of rejecting and keeping something out of

consciousness ” (p. 147, emphasis in the original).

It should be noted that there is no mention in either the

1895 formulation or the 1915 deﬁnition that repres-

sion – the process – is itself unconscious. Yet, introduc-

tory texts in psychology or psychoanalysis treat as

axiomatic that the defenses, including repression, are

unconscious processes. The conscious counterpart of

repression, it is averred, is “suppression.” Yet, as I have

been suggesting for some time (e.g., Erdelyi 1990; 1993;

2001a), this rendering of repression as a necessarily

unconscious process, and its distinction from suppression,

constitutes a “grand-Bartlett effect” – a reconstructive

memory distortion operating at the level of the ﬁeld.

Although Freud’s half-century of psychological writing

on repression is not without some ambiguities and even

contradictions, the overwhelming textual evidence is that

Freud used repression and suppression interchangeably,

from his earliest writings (e.g., 1893, as we have seen) to

his last (e.g., An Outline of Psycho-Analysis , Freud

1940/1964).

It was Anna Freud (1936/1937), trying to tidy up her

father’s often messy work, who introduced in her book,

The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence , the diktat that

repression was unconscious and suppression was its con-

scious counterpart. This was, by the way, a retrograde

tack, since her father had pursued a Gordian knot-

cutting strategy of insisting on the continuity of mental

life , whether for “thought,” “resistance,” “guilt,” or other

mental processes. Thus, “it would be unjustiﬁable and

inexpedient to make a break in the unity of mental life

for the sake of propping up a deﬁnition” (Sigmund

Freud 1938/1964, p. 286). Complex mental processes

could be conscious or unconscious, according to Freud

p` re; they did not become something else just because

they crossed some hypothetical threshold of conscious-

ness. (For the view that repression can be conscious or

unconscious, see also Brewin [2003] and McNally [2003]).

I make a fuss about this semantic point because if the

unconscious-rendering process, repression, can be both

conscious and unconscious, then there is no controversy.

If repression ¼ suppression, then everybody believes in

repression. The myth morphs into the obvious.

Let us return to Sigmund Freud’s ﬁrst use of “repres-

sion” (Breuer & Freud 1895/1955, p. 10). Sensing a

problem here, the later psychoanalytic establishment

deployed the following explanatory footnote:

This is the ﬁrst appearance of the term “repressed” (‘v er-

dr¨ ngt ’) in what is to be its psycho-analytic sense.... The

word “intentionally” merely indicates the existence of a

motive and carries no implication of conscious intention.

(Footnote 1, in Breuer & Freud [1895/1955], Studies on

Hysteria , p. 10)

Although I have left out some of the arguments in the long,

full footnote, it is hard to reconcile with the case studies

making up the Studies on Hysteria . The patients discussed

are often deliberately and consciously pushing out some

memory or thought from consciousness. Indeed, at one

point, Freud uses the expression, “conscious rejection”

(p. 134). In his already-cited article “Repression,” Freud

(1915a/1957/1963) speaks of the “censorship of the con-

scious” (pp. 149–150) and actually feels obliged to warn

the reader against assuming that repression is always a

conscious undertaking: “it is a mistake to emphasize only

It was a question of things which the patient wished to forget,

and therefore intentionally repressed from his conscious

thought and inhibited and suppressed. (Breuer & Freud

1895/1955, p. 10)

Some 20 years later, in his article “Repression,” Freud

(1915a/1957/1963) provided a straightforward deﬁnition

of repression: “ the essence of repression lies simply in

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Erdelyi: The uniﬁed theory of repression

the repulsion which operates from the direction of the

conscious upon what is to be repressed” (p. 148). In

the Case of the Psychotic Dr. Schreber, Freud states

that repression “emanates from the highly developed

systems of the ego – systems which are capable of being

conscious” (Freud 1911/1958, p. 67). In the Case of the

“Rat Man” (Freud 1909/1955), thought-avoidance is

effected by conscious thought-distraction: “His original

intention ... had been repressed by his praying”

(p. 193). In a footnote added in 1914 to The Interpretation

of Dreams , Freud remarks, “In any account of the theory

of repression it would have to be laid down that a

thought becomes repressed as a result of the continued

inﬂuence upon it of two factors: It is pushed from

the one side (by the censorship of Cs .) and from the

other (by the Ucs. )” (1900/1953, p. 547). In his article,

“The Unconscious,” Freud (1915b/1957) states, “Con-

sciousness stands in no simple relation ... to repression

(p. 192).

There are occasional materials tending to point in the

opposite direction. For example, in an 1896 paper,

Freud places at one point a parenthetical “unconscious”

in front of the term “defense” – “(unconscious) defence”

(Freud 1896a/1962). In The Interpretation of Dreams

(1900/1953), Freud suggests that repression “lays more

stress” than suppression “upon the fact of attachment to

the unconscious” (p. 606). But such materials are isolated

and even ambiguous tidbits in a massive corpus.

In psychiatry and clinical psychology of the last two

decades, the conscious–unconscious issue in repression

and defense has played out in contradictory trends. In

the DSM-III-R (American Psychiatric Association 1987),

the treatment of the material is in the revisionist vein.

Defense , which had been conceived of by Freud as a

voluntary (“intentional,” “motivated”) act, is rendered as

“relatively involuntary” (p. 393). In a formulation that

touches neither on the question of intention nor the

conscious or unconscious nature of the process, repression

is deﬁned as “a mechanism in which the person is unable

to remember or be cognitively aware of disturbing wishes,

feelings, thoughts, or experiences” (p. 394). Com-

pleting the revisionist arc, Phebe Cramer (1998; 2000)

disallows both consciousness and intentionality in

defense mechanisms; when they are present, the processes

are recast – and forcefully distinguished from defense

mechanisms – as coping mechanisms . The DSM-IV-TR

(American Psychiatric Association 2000) signiﬁcantly

backtracks, however: Defense mechanisms and “coping

styles” are treated as equivalent (p. 807), and defense

mechanisms are described as processes of which “individ-

uals are often unaware (p. 807, emphasis added), even if it

is suggested, somewhat self-contradictorily, that “ Defense

mechanisms (or coping styles) are automatic psychological

processes” (p. 807). It is no longer clear what, if any, sub-

stantive distinction is retained between repression (“expel-

ling disturbing wishes, thoughts, or experiences from

conscious awareness”) and suppression (“intentionally

avoiding thinking about disturbing problems” [p. 813]).

Recently, George Vaillant (1998) has urged “a way to

circumvent the false dichotomy of conscious/unconscious”

(p. 1156).

In a strict psychophysical sense, true subliminality is

problematical because there may be no true limen (see

Erdelyi 1986; 2004a; 2004b; Macmillan 1986; Merikle &

Reingold 1991) and therefore the conscious–unconscious

distinction may not be categorical but polar, representing

opposite ends on a grainy continuum – much like the

distinctions between child and adult, day and night, per-

ception and memory (Erdelyi 1986; 1996; 2004a; 2004b).

Freud himself, in his later writings, began to sense this

problem. An inspection of his 1923 and 1933 diagrams

of the structural model (Freud 1923/1961, p. 24; 1933/

1964, p. 78) suggests that there is no limen or threshold

separating consciousness from unconsciousness, but a

fuzzy region in which the two merge. Thus, even if one

sought it, a crisp, categorical distinction between suppres-

sion and repression may be unrealizable. 1 Laboratory

evidence shows (see sect. 4) that conscious memory

waxes and wanes over time. Consciousness for the past,

therefore, is not either-or but an integral (as in calculus)

over time, varying with the time at which testing begins

and the temporal window over which it is evaluated

(Erdelyi 1996; 2004a; 2004b; Ionescu & Erdelyi 1992).

It is noteworthy that none of the experiments in the lab-

oratory literature evaluated by David Holmes (1974; 1990)

in his inﬂuential reviews, which caused him to suggest the

abandonment of repression for want of laboratory conﬁr-

mation, ever sought to establish that the variable investi-

gated (repression) was unconscious. Thus, none of the

evaluated experiments satisﬁed Holmes’s own criterion

for repression. It should be noted also that the trait

approach to repression, in which “repressiveness” is

assessed by personality tests (e.g., Byrne 1961; Weinberger

1990; Weinberger et al. 1979), cannot establish whether

the putative repressors are doing their repressing

unconsciously. Not surprisingly, in a recent review of

defense mechanism measures, Davidson and MacGregor

(1998) found that no instrument succeeded in establishing

the unconscious criterion for defense mechanisms (see

their Table 1, p. 984).

In recent years, the idea of repression as inhibition or

suppression of selected mental contents has increasingly

moved into the mainstream of psychology. An important

development in the experimental literature on memory

has been the recognition of “retrieval inhibition” as a

“missing link” in intentional forgetting (Bjork 1989;

Geiselman et al. 1983). The inﬂuence of neuroscience

has pushed the ﬁeld past pat computer models to more

realistic biological conceptualizations and has led to an

appreciation of the evolution of the brain yielding inhi-

bition by higher-order regions of more primitive ones

(e.g., Bjork 1989). In a recent book on repression,

Michael Billig (1999) suggests that normal language

development involves the mastering and automatization

of skills for both expressing and repressing ideas.

Evolutionary psychology (e.g., Badcock 2000; Wright

1994) has pointed to the importance of repression – and

self-deception in general – for various adaptive purposes,

including the more effective deception of others. Ander-

son and his colleagues (e.g., Anderson 2001; Anderson &

Green 2001; Levy & Anderson 2002) have experimentally

underscored the “adaptive” function of retrieval inhibition

for the purpose of avoiding potentially interfering or

otherwise unwanted memories. In recent neuroscience

research, Anderson and colleagues (Anderson et al.

2004) identify a neurological circuit involved in intentional

retrieval-inhibition and consequent forgetting: Activation

of prefrontal cortical areas (associated with “executive

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Erdelyi: The uniﬁed theory of repression

control functions”) results in the inhibition of hippocampal

activity, with resultant declines in accessible memory.

Some convergence is thus in evidence.

A ﬁnal task remains in this historical overview: to differ-

entiate between Freud’s repression in the narrow sense

and repression in the general sense . In Freud’s earliest

writings, he meant by repression the simple inhibition or

exclusion from consciousness of some idea or impulse or

memory. Almost immediately, as his clinical experience

forced him to be more nuanced about his material, he

noticed that the process of repression could be partial.

In 1894, for example, he noted the phenomenon of

isolation (or intellectualization): Certain patients seemed

to dissociate the factual and affective components of an

idea and repress only the affective part. Such individuals

could evidence endless conscious knowledge of the facts

and yet be deeply out of touch with the emotional

aspects of these facts. (Laboratory psychology, in its

experimental assays, has ignored such variations on the

basic process.) With further clinical experience, Freud

was able to identify a whole basketful of such partial

repressions, including, projection , reaction formation ,

displacement , symbolization , rationalization , and even

representation by triviality . At ﬁrst, Freud treated all

these inhibitions or distortions of reality as “repression,”

but by 1926, he felt compelled to simplify for fear of

losing his original simple concept of repression (inhibition,

suppression, etc.). And so he made a distinction between

repression in the narrow (original) sense and “repression

in the widest sense” (Freud 1937/1964, p. 257), which

subsumed all the defensive mechanisms, including repres-

sion in the narrow sense, and renamed the whole set

defense processes or defense mechanisms . (For example:

“It is of advantage to distinguish the more general notion

of ‘defence’ from ‘repression.’ Repression is only one of

the mechanisms which defence makes use of” [Freud

1926a/1959, p. 114].)

(see also Erdelyi 1990; 1993). Thus, the mechanism of

repression can be probed in the laboratory irrespective

of its goal.

In the uniﬁed theory, repression is divided into two

subclasses: (1) inhibitory or subtractive processes (e.g.,

degrading the “signal”), and (2) elaborative or additive

processes (e.g., adding “noise” to the signal). This division

aligns with the psychological development of the concept

both in Freudian and experimental psychology. As noted

in the preceding historical review, Freud’s initial con-

ception of “repression” was of the inhibitory or subtractive

variety (“suppression,” “inhibition,” “dissociation”) followed

in short order by a number of elaborative “transformations”

(“constructions,” “distortions”), among them, rationaliz-

ation , projection , reversal , displacement , symbolization .

Experimental psychology, similarly, began with subtractive

processes – for example, cognitive avoidance that results in

forgetting (Ebbinghaus) – followed gradually, as the ﬁeld

began to deal with more complex stimuli (short stories

instead of lists of nonsense syllables or words), with construc-

tive/reconstructive processes (e.g., Bartlett). This two-part

division of repression is easily accommodated by Bartlett

since one of his basic “reconstructions” is omission (e.g.,

Bartlett 1932, p. 66, pp. 99–102, pp. 125–126), with the

other operations comprising standard elaborative reconstruc-

tions (see sect. 5.1). 2

3.2. Inhibitory or subtractive processes

In inhibitory repression the consciousness-lowering oper-

ation is readily conceived of as some type of psychological

subtraction that results in lower consciousness (e.g., we

subtract attentional allocation from a channel, we reduce

or eliminate thinking about some material).

3.2.1. Simple inhibition . In simple inhibition, about which

a huge amount of research literature has accumulated (see

sect. 4), some speciﬁc target (a list of nonsense syllables,

some dreadful event, a taboo desire) is inhibited or sub-

tracted out from consciousness. The classic clinical litera-

ture, dissociated from laboratory research for most of its

history, did not assimilate the Ebbinghausian tradition

and conﬂated the inhibitory operation with the resulting

effects on memory. In the present work, the two are

separated: Inhibition of consciousness for some target

material results, over time, in the progressive degradation

of accessible memory for the target material. Thus, remove

the inhibition, and the material – at least some of it – will

have been forgotten. Contrary to Ebbinghaus, however,

forgetting does not imply decay – permanent loss – of

the original material. With retrieval effort (“retrieval

time” [Roediger & Thorpe 1978]; “the work of remember-

ing” [e.g., Breuer & Freud 1895/1955]), the forgotten

partially returns: With retrieval effort, memory is

hypermnesic (enhanced), just as it is amnesic (diminished)

with retrieval inhibition. Thus, Ebbinghaus represents

only one side of what happens to memory over time.

Here is a clinical fragment, The Case of B., which illus-

trates concretely some of the foregoing proposals and

which points to several additional considerations that

bear on inhibitory repression:

B., a young man who sought therapy for a pathological grief

reaction to the death of his brother ﬁve years earlier, noted

in his intake interview that he avoids thinking of the traumatic

3. The uniﬁed theory of repression

The theory is uniﬁed in that it integrates largely dissociated

traditions of the clinic and laboratory. It builds substan-

tially on the just-reviewed work of Sigmund Freud (with

some emendations) and harmonizes this material with

well-established experimental knowledge derived from

the psychological laboratory and, to some extent, from

neuroscience.

3.1. Conceptualization of repression

Repression, essentially, is a consciousness-lowering

process . It consists of a class of operations that reduces

the accessibility to consciousness of some target material.

Repression, further, is instrumental in bringing about

a discernible goal – for example, preventing the span

of consciousness from being breached or preventing

some intolerable psychological material from entering

consciousness.

The null hypothesis is adopted that repression is the

same mechanism whether it is used for defense or some

other purpose. Only when the goal of repression is to

defend against psychological distress is the mechanism

of repression conceived of as a mechanism of defense

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Erdelyi: The uniﬁed theory of repression

event. (For example: “I clearly avoided to know anything;

everything I know bothers me” [1st Evaluation Interview];

“I couldn’t metabolize-digest the event. It makes me still

sad – don’t feel comfortable discussing” [1st Therapy

Session]; “I don’t think about many details of things that hap-

pened. I don’t remember too many different situations about

him, I just remember him ... like smoke .... It’s blurry, it’s

not a very clear view” [3rd Therapy Session]. But, by the

fourth therapy session, B. states: “I am [now] thinking more

[of my brother] – I remember him more.”

For years, B. had avoided potential reminders of his broth-

er’s death. He could not bear to attend the funeral and later, to

avoid the dreaded topic, would lie to acquaintances who

inquired after the brother, leading them to believe that the

brother was alive. The whole-scale repression of the brother

complex was not altogether successful. The repressed

brother returned to haunt him in a variety of ways. Past the

midpoint of his therapy, when he was complaining of sexual

problems, B. reported that the image of his brother’s face

appeared to him as he was attempting intercourse with his

(B.’s) girlfriend. (Adapted from Erdelyi 1993, pp. 137–138,

with permission from Prentice Hall)

Although there is no independent evaluation of B.’s

ongoing recall level for his brother up to and through his

therapy, it is noteworthy that the alleged amnesia and sub-

sequent hypermnesia resemble the effects obtained in the

laboratory (see sect. 4): Thought-avoidance yields amnesia

and the subsequent refocusing of retrieval effort, hyperm-

nesia. Also worth underscoring is that the material being

avoided by B. was a major emotional event and not some

innocuous laboratory stimulus. Finally, B. seemed to be

conscious of his efforts to avoid thinking of his dead

brother.

I now consider some nuances regarding the interpret-

ation of empirical data on defensive inhibition.

Burns 1982; Schooler & Eich 2000). The amnesia that

results from cognitive masking can be retrograde (Loftus

& Burns 1982) or anterograde (Erdelyi & Blumenthal

1973) – or it may be amnesia for contemporaneous

details (as in Erdelyi & Appelbaum 1973). The relevance

of cognitive masking for any putative defense involving

decrements in performance with emotional stimuli is

that diminished performance may be due to nondefensive

allocation of processing resources to other items or chan-

nels. Thus, it cannot be automatically assumed that poorer

performance in connection with emotional stimuli is a con-

sequence of defensive repression. For this reason it is

particularly convenient to have clinical cases (like the

Case of B.) in which the patient explicitly asserts a con-

scious effort to avoid thinking about the disturbing

material because of the distress that the material would

provoke.

The phenomenon of cognitive masking has signiﬁcant

implications for the contentious area of memory for

trauma (for far-ranging overviews, see Brewin 2003;

Brown et al. 1998; Brown et al. 1999; Freyd 1996;

Kihlstrom 2006; McNally 2003; Pope et al. 1998; Terr

1993; van der Kolk et al. 1996). Does emotionality

enhance or degrade memory? The answer, actually,

seems to be yes and yes . There is widespread consensus

that emotionality enhances memory for central elements

of stimuli but degrades memory for peripheral items.

This simple formulation is readily linked to laboratory

studies where the stimulus is relatively simple. In the

Erdelyi and Appelbaum (1973) experiment, for example,

there is, literally, a central item (e.g., a swastika) and an

array of items surrounding the central item. In real-life

settings, where the “stimulus” may last minutes, hours,

days, and even years, it is not so obvious what is

“central” and what is “peripheral,” except by post-hoc

deﬁnition. The simple central-versus-peripheral distinc-

tion, in any case, yields an ambiguous answer for overall

memory, which would be made up of central and periph-

eral items (however deﬁned). Since, as the current consen-

sus holds, emotionality has opposite effects on central and

peripheral items, it is not difﬁcult to conceive of different

experiments yielding different conclusions about overall

memory for emotional stimuli on the basis of different

framings of what constitutes “central” and “peripheral”

components.

Perhaps a more basic question is what constitutes

“memory,” which it would be a mistake to conceive of as

some homogenous mass about which a sweeping generaliz-

ation is possible. Memory, in many signiﬁcant respects, is a

heterogeneous construct, and what might apply to one

aspect of memory might not apply to another (see, particu-

larly, Brewin 2003; Erdelyi 1990; 1996; Schooler & Eich

2000; van der Kolk 1994; van der Kolk et al. 1996).

Consider the Case of B. Let us assume, for the sake of argu-

ment, that what B. states is roughly accurate and that his

memory for his dead brother is “blurry,” “not ... very

clear,” “like smoke.” Is B. actually suffering psychogenic

amnesia for his brother – or the opposite, hypermnesia?

The answer, as already suggested, is both . For some ﬁve

years, B. has avoided thinking, talking, or being reminded

of his brother. Not surprisingly, his memory for his

brother has become sketchy, though, of course, he has

not outrightly forgotten his brother. Yet, in signiﬁcant

respects, B.’s problem, as in posttraumatic stress disorder

3.2.1.1. Inaccessibility associated with emotionality need not

imply defense . Consider the experiment on “cognitive

masking” by Erdelyi and Appelbaum (1973). Observant

Jewish students (pilot work had shown weak effects with

mixed groups of students) were ﬂashed a slide with a swas-

tika or a window (the swastika with arms extended at right

angles to form a square framing perpendicular cross-bars)

in the center, and neutral symbols circularly arrayed

around the central element. No sensitivity ( d 0 ) differences

were found for the swastika versus the window, but there

was a d 0 diminution for the surround items arrayed around

the swastika. Was this a case of perceptual defense/repres-

sion not being powerful enough to stave off the perception

of the center swastika, but sufﬁcient to defend against its

peripheral surround? There was a third, identically

treated group that was ﬂashed a stimulus with a different

central item, a Star of David , which also, like the swastika

center, produced a diminution of d 0 for the surround

items. On the assumption that the Jewish students did

not have a propensity to defend against a Star of David,

the conclusion reached was that attention had been

captured by either of the emotionally signiﬁcant center

items (swastika or Star of David), resulting in diminished

processing resources for the surround items. This type of

phenomenon has been persistently observed in the exper-

imental literature, under various labels (e.g., “narrowing of

attention,” “weapon focus,” “mental shock”): Central items

are well processed, but the peripheral items are poorly

perceived or recalled (see Easterbrook 1959; Loftus &

BEHAVIORAL AND BRAIN SCIENCES (2006) 29:5 503

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