Townsend Harris High School AP Psychology Band 1

Shaniza Nizam March 6, 2012

Decay theory suggest that we forget something because the memory of it fades with time. This theory would suggest that if we do not attempt to recall an event, the greater the time since the event the more likely we would be to forget the event. Thus, this theory suggests that memories are not permanent. The interference theory of forgetting suggest that we would forget something because other information learned is interfering with our ability to recall it. There are two types of interference. Proactive Interference: occurs when something that we previously learned interferes with remembering newer information. For example, imagine that you took one psychology course last term, and you are currently taking a psychology course that is very similar to the psychology course you took last term. You are finding it difficult to learn and remember the information in the psychology course you are currently taking. This may be due to the interference with similar information that you learned in the psychology course you took last term. Retroactive Interference: occurs when newer information learned interferes with remembering previously learned information. For example, you may have difficulty remembering what happened at a business meeting over a month ago because of information learned at a more recent business meeting. Freuds Concept of Repression Mollon (pp. 6061) cites Freud as defining the basic idea of repression in his 1915 paper Repression (1915a) as follows: The essence of repression lies simply in turning something away, and keeping it at a distance, from the conscious (1915a, p. 147). He notes that what he calls this definition (it is not called that by Freud) [11] does not imply that the process of repression is necessarily completely unconscious to begin with, nor that it is completely successful. It could well start with a persons deliberate effort to put something painful out of their mind, or not to think about. This is not unusual or mysterious. Cognitive therapists call this cognitive avoidance. However, this attempt to align Freuds theories with modern ideas is too simplistic, as I show below. Freud certainly wrote about the conscious suppression of memories, thoughts and impulses (especially in his early psychoanalytic publications), but in later writings the emphasis tended to be on their repression at an unconscious level (e.g., 1914, p. 93; 1915a, p. 153; 1926a, p. 91; 1939, pp. 9798; 1940, p. 187). Some idea of Freuds view of the processes involved in repression can be gained from an example provided in his paper on Repression (1915a). In the first part of the paper he gave a general exposition of these processes, frequently alluding to his clinical observations or to what psychoanalysis is able to show us as validating his account (pp. 147, 149, 151, 152). This all sounds very impressive, until one examines the first of the clinical examples he used to illustrate the process. For this purpose he chose a well-analysed example of an animal phobia, that of the Wolf Man: The instinctual impulse subjected to repression here is a libidinal attitude towards the father, coupled with a fear of him. After repression, this impulse vanishes out of consciousness: the father does not appear in it as an object of libido. As a substitute for him we find in a corresponding place some animal which is more or less fitted to be an object of anxiety. The formation of the substitute for the ideational portion [of the instinctual representative] has come about by displacement along a chain of connections which is determined in a particular way. The quantitative portion has not vanished, but been transformed into anxiety. The result is fear of a wolf, instead of a demand for love from the father. (pp. 155; see also p. 155, n.1)

Summing up, Freud is saying that the little boys libidinal desire for his father was repressed into his unconscious, and that the sexual impulse was transformed into an animal phobia. It sounds vaguely plausible if one can accept the idea of infant boys experiencing homosexual desires for their father and an outdated theory of psychical processes analogous to a hydraulic model of energy transformation. It is obviously crucial to discover how Freud actually uncovered the repressed idea or instinctual impulse that is central to his exposition. If we turn to the Wolf Man paper, we find that the clinical evidence is the celebrated wolf-dream in which the 4year-old boy looks out of a window and sees a tree in the branches of which are seated a number of motionless wolves. According to Freuds ideas, this dream to which the Wolf Man (or Freud) kept returning represents some memory or unconscious phantasy that is so disturbing it has to be concealed by a seemingly innocuous conscious idea (the wolf-dream). Freud interpreted it as a disguised representation of a memory of the boys parents copulating, on which occasion the infant was seized with horror at the sight of his mother sans penis. This activated severe castration anxiety, which suppressed his negative Oedipus complex, i.e., his homosexual libidinal desires for his father, what Freud described in the case history as his wish to be copulated with by his father (1918, pp. 2938, 46). Following the sight of his parents copulating, both his father and mother became wolves and the infant boy later identified himself with his castrated mother during the dream (p. 47). By some mechanism not entirely clear, under the pressure of his castration anxiety, the libidinal desire for his father was repressed and the boy developed a wolf phobia. (For a fuller examination of this part of Freuds analysis, see Esterson, 1993, pp. 7275, 156157.) One looks in vain for any empirical ground on which Freuds analysis can be supported. His argument for the repression process is circular. The presumption of repression is used to justify the search for, and uncovering of, the traumatic experience, and the inferred repressed ideas purportedly explain the repression process. The only firm evidence provided is the wolf-dream and subsidiary informationand even this turns out to be unreliable. We now know that the wolves in the dream were actually dogs, and there are serious doubts as to whether the patient even had a wolf phobia (Esterson, 1993, pp. 70, 156157). A theory of repression based on analyses like this (not untypical) example can scarcely be said to have much of an empirical foundation. As Mollon indicates (p. 62), by 1915 Freuds expositions on repression were concerned primarily with the repression of instinctual impulses and the ideas arising from them, rather than of specific memories. He also notes that Freud postulated further subtle distinctions between primal repression and repression proper (p. 61), but as he himself does not find that these ideas have held any clinical meaning he does not explore them. This is just as well, since Freuds deeper explorations into the psychoanalytic processes involved in repression became increasingly incoherent (Macmillan, 1997, pp. 325327, 477484). Freud himself confessed: A number of simple formulas which to begin with seemed to meet our needs have later turned out to be inadequate (1933, p. 92). In fact he had earlier acknowledged that his exposition of the process of repression in Introductory Lectures (19161917) was both crude and fantastic and quite impermissible in a scientific account (p. 296). Nor were his subsequent attempts to overcome the theoretical problems he faced any more successful. It was no exaggeration when, in the course of attempting to make sense of Freuds later expositions on the subject, McDougall (1936) described them as a great tangle in which Freud lashes about like a great whale caught in a net of his own contriving (1936, p. 60; see also Esterson, 1993, pp. 227232).