“I beileve in repressed memories only in the vein that you ‘don’t seem to remember the event’, but if someone who was there suddenly comes along and asks you about it, you will remember clearly.”
You wouldn’t have been repressing it, then. That’s garden variety remembering. If it were what we’re talking about, you’d need not “someone who was there” but a highly trained genius brain excavator, i.e. a psychiatrist, to dig in your head and tell you what you don’t know about yourself.
“That is, you remember some stuff clearly but it just never comes to mind unless someone brings it up. And if nobody ever brings it up, well, it never comes up - so you have ‘repressed’ the memory”
This has nothing to with the subject at hand, really. People not bringing it up doesn’t constitute repression.
Have a friend who was repeatedly sexually abused by her dad (no doubt) from very early on. She did ‘repress’ very many memories, which only began to come back as she began to deal with what happened to her. She only ever had one personality, tho. If you don’t want to remember something, you sure enough can ‘repress’ it by choosing to forget it.
—This has nothing to with the subject at hand, really. People not bringing it up doesn’t constitute repression.—
We’re both mincing words. I’ve discovered a couple of “shocking events” from my past that I was “repressing”. When someone asked about them though, I remembered them vividly. I may have been “actively” or “subconsciously” repressing them, but the fact is that they were significant, yet I never thought about them for decades.
Think about a highly skilled professional football player that represses the really bad game he had when he was in Jr High. He may subconciously avoid thinking about it. And he may be so successful that until he meets a guy at his 35th high school reunion that brings it up, he had forgotten all about it. He did do a form of memory repression. Especially since most of us would never forget such a thing and probably think about it every now and then, within the context of it being our career.
We’re talking about the business of human psycology. Words have “vague” meanings, and they like it that way.