Motivated forgetting is the concept that memories can be influenced by feelings, self-protection, or distorted perception. Freud suggested that people often forget traumatic events or things associated with unpleasant feelings. However, false memories and cognitive demands may also affect memory recall.
Motivated forgetting is a concept that arose in early theories of psychology, and many may associate it better with repressed memories. The essential idea is that the ability to recall a memory can be influenced by feelings, a need for self-protection or a distorted perception. Why we fail to remember certain things is actually the subject of many theories. Not everyone attributes a bad memory to some form of emotional motivation.
Theories that introduced motivated forgetting come from Freud and some of his contemporaries. Freud suggested that people often have imperfect or absent recollection of traumatic events or things associated with unpleasant feelings. For example, a person is highly motivated to forget a doctor’s appointment if he fears the doctor.
There is a lot of evidence that many trauma victims do not have full memories of the traumatic events. Many sufferers of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) experience significant memory loss. Freud said that this loss resulted from an unconscious desire to repress the memory and keep the person seemingly at ease in the present. This removal can also be called a basic defense mechanism.
Freudians also argued that even if memories could not be accessed, they still caused disturbances to the individual in the present. The way to free people from the pain of these memories was to go back, find the experiences and relive them. In theory, individuals who were able to recall unconsciously hidden material were ultimately more comfortable or neurotic-free.
The problem with this theory, as it was discovered in the second half of the 20th century, is that people can recall false memories under hypnosis or even when fully conscious. This may be because the original memory was not accurate or because a person wishes to please a therapist. Remembering things that are not true is called confabulation, and it also exists in some diseases such as the amnestic-confabulatory syndrome. It is not intentional or conscious, and in one sense it could be called reasoned and inaccurate recall.
False memories and the idea of motivated forgetting are also connected to some theories of Gestalt psychology. Gestaltists may argue that humans almost always distort what they see and remember. They try to make groups look the same; end stories that are never ending; or change the way things happen to feel better. Therefore, motivated forgetting results from a basic and constant perceptual distortion and can also be caused by repression.
Other memory theories argue that there is no such thing as motivated forgetting. For example, some scientists believe that neurons associated with a memory can degrade over time. This means that memories can simply decay.
Alternatively, memories may not become solid if the brain is busy with many other things after an event. It has been suggested that in the early part of memory formation a large amount of cognitive activity damages the integrity of a memory. Instead of motivated forgetting, the inability to remember may be due to an extra cognitive demand that interferes with memory solidification.
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