Repressed Memories Quotes

Americans use the word 'dream' as often as psychoanalysts do.

Flashbacks rarely involve language. Mine certainly didn't. They were visual, motor, and sensory, and they took place in a relentless, horrifying present.

memories fall apart too.

The truth about childhood, as many of us have had to endure it, is inconceivable, scandalous, painful. Not uncommonly, it is monstrous. Invariably, it is repressed. To be confronted with this truth all at once and to try to integrate it into our consciousness, however ardently we may wish it, is clearly impossible.

For people like me, who have blocked out a chunk of their past, you wonder - if you open that door, if you walk into that room of your memories, what will happen? Will it destroy you or will it make you stronger?

The thing with psychoanalysis is I know basically what happened in my childhood. I know where things went wrong and I know what my mother said at one point and what my father said at one point.

Fear comes from your past observations. That fear settles inside you. It becomes your psyche. Something triggers it and it fuels that subconscious. There is no logic to it.

Anybody who says, 'My childhood was completely happy,' is a person who isn't remembering the truth.

...Things happened when you were little. Things you don't remember now, and don't want to. But they need to escape, need to worm their way out of that dark place in your brain where you keep them stashed.

I know it's fashionable to blame your childhood for everything nowadays - thank you, Freud. The thing is, though, I really don't feel scarred by mine. But perhaps if I'd been in therapy for 10 years, and you were able to read the records, you'd disagree.

Our lives are determined less by our childhood than by the traumatic way we have learned to remember our childhoods.

If you didn't remember something happening, was it because it never had happened? Or because you wished it hadn't?

Psychoanalysis is the mental illness it purports to cure

Apparently, as a kid, I used to eat spiders. Maybe there's some Freudian significance behind that.

I have a hot memory, but I know I've forgotten many things, too, just squashed things in favor of survival.

Some things I don't want to remember.

The major task of the twentieth century will be to explore the unconscious, to investigate the subsoil of the mind.

It took me 14 years to write poems about Vietnam. I had never thought about writing about it, and in a way I had been systematically writing around it.

Painful memories didn't just ease back in-they shoved the door open hard, all of them and all at once

One of the things that I share with Bryan Becket is this hole in my childhood memory. There's about five years of my life that's virtually gone. I've thought about it a lot, and I've come to the conclusion that it might be for my own protection that those memories are gone, and maybe I don't want to dredge up those things.

There are years from my childhood that I cannot remember and I cannot forget.

One is constantly trying to figure out what came together in one's childhood. Lots of people spend significant portions of their lives in therapy - especially in the States - trying to work out who they are. I'm certain there is a little of that in the business of writing. That would explain why certain images and themes recur.

Memory is corrupted and ruined by a crowd of memories. If I am going to have a true memory, there are a thousand things that must first be forgotten. Memory is not fully itself when it reaches only into the past. A memory that is not alive to the present does not remember the here and now, does not remember its true identity, is not memory at all. He who remembers nothing but facts and past events, and is never brought back into the present, is a victim of amnesia.

Too much has been forgotten in the name of memory.

In psychoanalysis as in art, God resided in the details, the discovery of which required enormous patience, unyielding seriousness, and the skill of an acrobat - walking a tightrope over memory and speculation, instinct and theory, feeling and denial.