Freud clearly supported the permanence of memory, on which he based the psychoanalytic approach. One of the ways by which he introduced his skepticism was the mystic writing pad paradigm. According to this paradigm memory consists of a wax layer, covered by a sheet of wax paper and a transparent celluloid sheet. When a memory is ‘written’ on the celluloid sheet, the words appear on the wax paper. When new experiences bring new memories, the paper is moved free of the wax layer, but the "trace" of the words has been preserved at the wax tablet beneath the sheets.
According to his writings “memory has an unlimited receptive capacity for new perceptions and nevertheless lays down permanent, though not unalterable, memory traces of them" (Ibid, 176). Having Freud as a reference, psychoanalysis uses techniques such as transference, dream interpretation and mainly free association in order for patients to re-experience repressed feelings and wishes which have been frustrated in childhood, such as memories referring to painful incidents which are not recalled in order to avoid anxiety. This suggests that memory’s retrieval mechanism may be responsible for repression phenomena. Despite apparent success in using psychoanalysis to recover memories, the technique is subject to many criticisms. Skeptics and many clinicians support the argument that recovered memories are fabrications and they evaluate this opinion with scientific evidence. The phenomenon of infantile amnesia is one of them, and suggests that things learned from specific experiences during infancy are forgotten rapidly and it’s unlike to be remembered at all during adulthood. Another fact that supports their claim is the false memory syndrome. By false memory we mean these memories which are distortions of actual experiences, or creations of imagined ones. Many false memories involve a mixture and confusion of facts that may have happened in different times, but are remembered as occurring together. Others are a confusion of dreams and reality, and many of them involve errors in source memory. Recovered memories can also find their origin in fantasy, illusion and hallucination, in borrowed ideas and at last in an implantation of a suggestion by the therapist. Scientific research has given support to the fallibility of memory and it’s well known that it’s possible to implant people with experiences, feelings and even traumatic incidents that have never occurred in the past. “The phenomenon of memory repression, and the process of therapy used in these cases to recover the memories, have not gained acceptance in the field of psychology, and are not scientifically reliable” (Schacter 1996).
The permanence of human memory is also supported by hypnotherapists who view hypnosis as a retrieval technique for completely forgotten memories. According to several hypnotherapists regression under hypnosis successfully brings out completely forgotten memories while it is possible to bring them out simply by suggesting that they would be recalled. This technique has been vastly used by law agencies around the world as an aid in criminal investigations since the early 1960s. Despite the number of successes in recovering memories, hypnosis has been criticized on many grounds over the years. Studies on hypnotic age regression showed only a limited number of returning to a developmentally previous mode of psychological functioning. Several studies have examined the EEG patterns of adults regressed to early months of their life in order to observe whether there is a return of the slow, arrhythmic brain waves found during infancy. While early studies did not find any changes from the normal adult EEG patterns (True & Stephenson, 1951), resent evidence provided by Raikov (1983) showed return during hypnotic regression but posed inherent methodological difficulties to the extent that the findings could not provide convincing support. Even if hypnotism achieves it’s goal which is reviving a repressed inaccessible memory, it is more likely because of interpersonal relationship existing between hypnotist and patient and not because of the mysterious power that hypnosis is attributed with (Hilgard, 1977). Furthermore several other experiments not only failed to produce reviving of experiences but showed that patients under hypnosis provided descriptions even if they were asked to progress to an age of 70 or 80 years while being younger. Other hypnotised patients also showed a return to prenatal life or even past incarnations.
Interference can play a big role in determining the amount of forgetting between the information’s initial acquisition and the time of its attempted retrieval. It occurs when one set of learned information interferes with another set, and results to a retrieval failure or an alternation of the initial information (memory). Two kinds of interference exist, the retroactive referring to interference caused by the learning of later information with the recall of earlier ones, and the proactive referring to interference caused by the learning of earlier material with the recall of later ones. Loftus and Palmer (1975) studied this kind of memory error in an experiment in which participants were asked to view a slide sequence showing an automobile. The experiment included three stages them being, the viewing of the event, a post event interview or narrative in which additional inferences by the witness occurred, and a final test of accuracy in remembering the original event. The results showed that witnesses often recalled their inferences or other information from the post-event session as though they were part of the original event, and that in many occasions they were not able to identify the source of their recall. Loftus claimed that the reason for this was the way in which memory may be altered by subsequent information, clearly supporting the importance of retroactive interference.
Alternation can also be observed by the reconstructive ‘nature’ of memory. Giving a big role on interpretation, Bartlett (1932) suggested that we reconstruct the past by trying to fit it into our existing schemata and the more difficult this is to do, the more likely it is that information is forgotten or distorted so that it fits. Reconstructive memory theory was also supported by Loftus (1980) who has investigated it in relation to eyewitness testimony. She argued that the evidence given by witnesses in court cases are highly unreliable, for which she blames the form of questions that witnesses are asked, influencing their memories of what they have witnessed. (As cited in Gross, 1996)
‘Permastore’ theory provided a different picture of how certain memories function. Bahrick (1984) tested college graduates to see how much they remembered of Spanish language classes that they had taken in high school or college. Most of them had made no use of the language after finishing the course, so this was recall without intervening practice. There was a difference between recall and recognition, but in both, retention seemed to have levelled out over very long periods of time. Bahrick suggested that some memory is retained in a 'permastore' which is unaffected by the passage of time. Those students who had learned better originally, remembered better over the years. A similar pattern is found for most procedural memory though procedures that are not learned through extensive practice can be lost very quickly.
The use of cues in remembering has also provided support for the permanence of memory traces which can be retrieved long after they have been ‘forgotten’. Many mnemonic techniques are based on developing memorable links between different bits of information, such as one item automatically leads on to the next. Tulving (1971) argued that forgetting might be due to the lack of appropriate retrieval cues, rather than the erasure or over-writing of the initial learning. Throughout his studies he observed that not only were the subjects able to recognize more than they could recall, suggesting that they knew more than their recall indicated, but more importantly that the experimenter was able to use retrieval cues to manipulate the probability that an item would or would not be accessible to the subject. Retrieval cues are also used during studies on autobiographical memories. By autobiographical memories we mean people’s memories of their own experiences through life. Lindon (1975), recorded and recalled events in her own life in a systematic way during a period of seven years. The recording of events was collected by means of short descriptions on cards, while the corresponding dates were written at the back of each card. During testing, she was reading the descriptions and was trying to recall the dates on which the event happened. Lindon found a steady loss of memory on these items, of about 6% a year. Also she showed that first events such as a first meeting of a series of following ones can be remembered much easier than later ones. A future replication of this study found life events to be much more slowly forgotten, where not a single instance of complete forgetting was found. (Wagenaar 1986). This once again proved that memories leave permanent traces on the memory system, which can later be retrieved with the appropriate cues.
Certain injuries to the brain, particularly to the hippocampus and surrounding regions, can produce disorders of memory. In anterograde amnesia, the patient’s ability to fix material in long-term memory is reduced. In retrograde amnesia, the loss is for memories prior to the injury and is sometimes attributed to a disruption of trace consolidation. An important issue is that patients with severe anterograde amnesia can acquire certain long-term memories, clearly shown by the case of H.M. who after the removal of his hippocampus, was left with severe anterograde amnesia. H.M had near normal memory for anything which he had learned prior to the surgery but he had little memory of events which occurred after the surgery. His short term memory was normal while he could not transfer information into the long term memory and if he could, he was unable to retrieve it. A similar example is this of Clive Wearing who was an expert on music knowledge. After the destruction of his hippocampus by a virus he suffered severe anterograde amnesia. Like H.M, he was unable to have memories of events which occurred after the destruction of the hippocampus, but he preserved his musical ability. The only difference with H.M was that his capacity for remembering events of his earlier life was extremely inconsistent.
By outlying all these years of empirical studies, I wanted to emphasize the complexity of memory as a human cognition mechanism. What all these studies suggested, is that there is no certain answer to the question on whether memories are permanent as there has not yet been, a complete understanding of the function of memory. This question may be unanswerable in principle, but I will favor the position which regards forgetting as a retrieval failure for the purpose of this essay. Throughout the essay I demonstrated that memories are permanently stored in our minds and can be recovered with several techniques. This cannot include all memories as a hole but certainly the majority of them. On the other hand memories may be altered with interference such as misleading information, as it was clearly shown by Loftus’ studies.
