ABSTRACT
The question of how emotional shock or psychological trauma affect the efficiency of cognitive processing has been of considerable clinical and practical interest for a long time. Early in this century Freud (1915) described how psychiatric patients ‘repressed’ memories of traumatic events and how these repressions could affect the cognitive functioning of these patients much later in life. Since the time of Freud’s pioneering work it has been observed in many clinical settings that a patient who has experienced a psychological trauma sometime fails to remember not only the traumatic event per se but also the events that occur prior to and immediately after the psychological trauma. Typically, the memory loss can be quite dramatic when the patient’s memory is assessed soon after the traumatic event. In later evaluations of the patient’s memory, however, a recovery of memory is usually observed. Excellent reviews of these phenomena of amnesia appear in Abse (1987), Horowitz (1986), Kihlstrom and Evans (1979a), Talland (1969), and Whitty and Zangwill (1977).
