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Essay / Understanding Recovered Memories: A Neurological Approach...
Sigmund Freud at the end of the 19th century, the validity of recovered memories was hotly debated by the psychoanalytic community. Recovered memories are forgotten memories of traumatic experiences that we remember later in life, often through psychoanalysis or psychotherapy, which can lead to the eventual creation of a pseudo-memory. Freud believed that these recovered memories of possible sexual abuse were the solution to the root problems of hysteria and obsessive neurosis (1), this is what the "Seduction Theory" states, a suggested hypothesis by Freud himself. Seduction theory, a hypothesis suggested by Freud, stated that "a repressed memory of an early childhood experience of sexual abuse or assault was the essential precondition for hysterical or obsessive symptoms, to which were added active sexual experience until the age of eight” (1). This theory was abandoned only a year after his proposal, after he accepted the fact that his patients' memories were mostly false and could have been caused by the suggestive methods he used in their psychoanalytic therapy. Freud's first case in the study of recovered memories was that of Miss G. de B, she came to him at the suggestion of her cousin with stuttering speech, and after psychoanalysis led Freud to proclaim that she had was sexually abused by her father despite the fact that she had no memory of such events, at first she believed him wholeheartedly until