ABSTRACT
As members of the post-Freudian generation, we have in common, at the least, the concept of motivated forgetting. At times we all stop to wonder about our state of mind and our motives when we experience disruptions in cognition. For slips and trips of the tongue and many memory dysfunctions, we might sometimes attribute the disruptions to factors such as inattention, distraction, or attentional overload, which do not necessarily imply motivational determinants. With one kind of forgetting, momentary forgetting, the thought that is forgotten was just in awareness before vanishing. After the disappearance it may obligingly reappear or it may resist recovery. The whole sequence of forgetting, followed by a remembering or a giving up of the effort to remember, may take just a few seconds, perhaps tempting us to dismiss our reflection about its motivation by attributing it to inattention, distraction, or attentional overload. However, this type of explanation may not quiet our doubts, since the momentary forgetting calls attention to itself by abruptly damming up our flow of speech in midstream, often without any external distraction to explain the blockage.
