Forgetting to Remember :: Biology Essays Research Papers

Forgetting to Remember The Source of your Symptoms? Imagine going about your daily business when, for some reason or another, you find yourself immersed in an intense, disturbing flashback of a traumatic horizontalt that you never knew you experienced? This flakey scenario is more commonplace than might be supposed and is opening up all sorts of legal and therapeutic controversy. Repression is one of the just about haunting concepts in psychology. The rationale is that some shocking occurrence is pushed back into an inaccessible box seat of the unconscious only to be retrieved later by a most confounded consciousness (1). Is the memory really real? If it is, why was it bem apply in the first place and what triggered its return? And how is it to be dealt with? Perhaps a better term for repression is dissociation. Dissociation refers to those discontinuities of the brain, the disconnections of mind that we all harbor without sentiency (2). Dissociation lets us step aside, split off from our cause knowledge, behavior, emotions, and frame sensations, our self-control, identity, and memory. This splitting of mind and pigeon holding of experience is a natural variant to the complex demands of daily life. One demonstration of this phenomenon involves a knee imperfection patient named Anastasia. Facing emergency surgery with a poor prognosis, she chose a spinal anesthetic with no sedative, so she could stay awake and prevent the operation. She remembers the clinician administering the spinal injection, but thats all. Her next consecutive memory of the ordeal was only if waking up in the recovery room, disappointed that she had fallen sleepy-eyed and missed the surgery. She was further perplexed when the surgeon walked in and thanked her for a undischarged discussion. Anastasia eventually realized that she had carried on a technical discourse for most two hours, a conversation she, to this day, has absolutely no recollection of (2). An even more dramatic illustration of dissociation (without, however, repression) is depicted in Donald Wymans vile experience. In the summer of 1993, while working in a strange Pennsylvania area clearing timber, Wyman suffered a terrible accident. A spacious tree fell on him, pinning his left leg. He knew he would die before anybody found him if he did not take matters into his own hands. So he made a tourniquet from a rawhide bootlace and used his chainsaw wrench to tighten it. He then went about methodically cutting off his left leg with his pocket knife.