Repression versus Dissociation

I have been using the broad term “amnesia” to describe Fraser’s memory loss, but I have also used the terms (or quoted people who have) “repression” and “dissociation” without clearly distinguishing their meanings. I view both terms as forms of adaptive forgetting. Distinguishing between the terms, however, sheds light upon the workings of

traumatic amnesia and helps to make sense of from a memory perspective Fraser’s MPD. Suppression, repression, and dissociation are all forms of forgetting, which is perhaps why the terms have been frequently collapsed together or otherwise muddled in discussion of childhood abuse.19 For Laurence J. Kirmayer, the “distinction between forget, repress, ignore, and dissociate is not simply an arbitrary choice of metaphor. Each is a phenomenologically distinct form of not-remembering” (191). By

“phenomenologically distinct” Kirmayer means that suppression is a conscious form of forgetting, a will to forget, if you like; repression is an unconscious form of forgetting motivated by fears and desires; and dissociation is a (conscious or unconscious) splitting

of consciousness whereby memories are partitioned off and the trauma is not integrated into a stable identity (Kirmayer 179).

Janice Haaken, through Freud’s early theory of hysteria, provides a helpful analogy for distinguishing between dissociation and repression. She understands

dissociation as vertical splits in consciousness or “double consciousness” and repression as the horizontal splits of the repression model to which Freud eventually shifted (“The Recovery of Memory” 1075-76). In other words, dissociation is a dividing wall;

repression is sub-flooring. Freyd sees both dissociation and repression more broadly as types of “knowledge isolation” (15). She perceives “a distinction [. . .] between a lack of awareness of the past (which may be called memory repression or traumatic amnesia) and a lack of awareness of the current situation (which may be called repression of affect or dissociative state of consciousness)” (15). Arguing that the work on trauma and

psychological defenses often neglects to account for the difference between failure to recall a past event (or repression) and failure to access in the present information that would be normally available (or dissociation), she contends the primary confusion in the scholarship around traumatic amnesia is between memory and consciousness. Freyd’s

clarification is an important one: repression can be viewed as an issue of memory,

19

Indeed, the term “repression” has been particularly contested. Although not germane to the overall argument of my project, the debate needs to be acknowledged that how repression is defined, and even whether it exists at all, continues to be actively disputed, as a recent scientific journal devoted to debating the topic attests. See Behavioral and Brain Sciences 29.5 (2006).

dissociation as an issue of consciousness. All forms of forgetting or alterations in consciousness are adaptive and protective mechanisms for the child who suffers abuse.

According to Kirmayer, research suggests that trauma-related amnesia and dissociated memories likely have multiple explanations: altered registration of the event at the time of the trauma because of a narrowing of attention, emotional interference with information processing, and alterations in self-consciousness. Victims might avoid thinking about what happened or actively suppress their memories and deliberately not respond to cues that prompt their memory to think about the event. Says Kirmayer, “Traumatic memories may be isolated from other networks of association by interpreting them as dissonant or inconsistent with self-representation and personal history” (180). If individuals refuse to speak about what happened and actively deny events to themselves and others, then “such denials may undermine the processes of rehearsal and semantic bridge-building necessary for ready recall” (Kirmayer 180).

In her review of Freyd’s Betrayal Trauma, Sylvia Fraser draws upon neuroscience to argue why some survivors of childhood abuse forget, and, in so doing, describes her experience of dissociation: “the neurological determinant for either the fixing of memory, or its short-circuiting, is believed to be the stress hormone adrenaline: A surge stimulates neural receptors, but too much floods neural receptors, preventing normal processing and integration. The result is a person who both knows and doesn’t know at the same time” (“Abuse Wars”). What I find interesting about Fraser’s comment is less the accuracy of the science she relies upon or the impulse to find a rational explanation to her question of how she could possibly forget her many years of abuse, than the condition of her

consciousness as simultaneously knowing and not knowing, which is to suggest the distinction between memory and consciousness that Freyd perceives. What memory stores is not always available to consciousness. As Fraser says, “Paradoxically, traumatic events seem to be both the least forgettable and the most forgettable of all experiences”

(“Abuse Wars”). In this condition of both remembered and forgotten, traumatic memories partitioned off from consciousness through dissociation in some ways mirror the state of the uncanny.

Shoshana Felman’s reading of the uncanny through Freud in What Does a Woman Want? is illustrative of this doubleness: “Freud’s psychoanalytic definition of the

‘uncanny’ (das Unheimliche) as the anxiety provoked through the encounter with

something that, paradoxically, is experienced as at once foreign and familiar, distant and close, totally estranged, unknown, and at the same time strangely recognizable and known” (56). Fraser similarly describes her experience in My Father’s House in her chapter entitled, “The Other.” Fraser’s description of the dissociation she experienced as a result of the abuse is, in one sense, radically complete: “Even now, I don’t know the full truth of that other little girl I created to do the things I was too frightened, too ashamed, too repelled to do” (15). Yet, the two selves are uncannily intertwined. As Fraser says, “She knew everything about me. I knew nothing about her, yet some connection always remained. Like estranged but fatal lovers, we were psychically attuned.” (15).

Felman suggests, following Freud, “that what is perhaps most uncanny about the uncanny is that it is not the opposite of what is canny but, rather, that which uncannily

subverts the opposition between ‘canny’ and ‘uncanny,’ between ‘heimlich’ and

‘unheimlich’” (65). Thus, defying the clear opposition between the two, Fraser’s dissociated self seems to be not entirely other or opposite but rather a subversion of the very notion of multiple selves where her alter personality communicates with her in the slippage between the two: “She telegraphed messages to me through the dreams we shared. She leaked emotions to me through the body we shared” (MFH 15). Fraser’s dissociated or alter personality is not as contained as the concept of dissociation implies. As Kirmayer argues, “Dissociation is often depicted in the literature as a rigid walling off of memories in an all or none fashion, but this does not accord well with either clinical or experimental evidence. In clinical reality, as in the laboratory, dissociation is found in all degrees of intensity in the same individual and is characterized more by its fluidity than by its rigid constancy” (180). Fraser’s separate selves share a fluidity and even inhabit each other in a specular way: “Hers was the guilty face I sometimes glimpsed in my mirror” (MFH 15). Her uncanny encounter is with a self which is, through distortions of memory and consciousness, both known and unknown.