ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses different types of memory, particularly procedural versus declarative memories. It also discusses functional amnesia may, in many important respects, differ from the recovered memories. Over the years the analytic attitude towards the recovery of memories has changed. Originally, one sought to recover memories of the significant event; the recovery of memories of the childhood past was the important thing. A confident judgement about the validity of a retrieved memory is therefore not necessarily an accurate one. People with long memories looked back at cases they had seen, consultations they had done, where they had not picked up the messages that the patients were giving them. One is that all victims of any kind of child sexual assault are affected in exactly the same way, and are traumatized to the same extent, so that they will have the same repression of the memory of the abuse.
