Hello Mary,
I am very sorry to read of your ongoing experience. Please feel free to email me directly from this website and we can discuss ways in which I might be able to help you.

Best wishes, Adam.

Matt, thanks for sharing your thoughts here, always very much appreciated.

However, if these cues are not activated, then I am currently not experiencing the process of remembering. Does that mean I have forgotten them? Is this amnesia? Or is it simply me not allocating my memory retrieval resources to those partciular memories.

So do people who exit hypnosis with no recollection of the experience truly not remember, or do they simply refuse to engage in the recall of that particular memory by utilsing self-deception.

And then, is self-deception what repression really is? Considering the fact that memories themselves can be argued to be nominalisations, and we don’t really store them somewhere, there is no ‘filing cabinet’, and all we actually do is engage in the activity of remembering, then repression can not actually exist. I think there is an interesting section on this in Hartlands Medical and Dental Hypnosis (Heap and Aravind).

On the other hand, when I cannot remember the name of a movie no matter how hard i try, then this can only really be called amnesia. But its more likely down to me constantly choosing the wrong neural pathway to engage in the activity of remembering that piece of information. Perhaps due to me not encoding the memory properly. If these neural pathways are not within our own control, then how can they be within anyone elses? Meaning, how can someone else make you truly forget something?

When i forget where i put my car keys, it is usually because i was thinking of something else and not encoding the memory correctly. The richer the data we encode, the more neural networks we form and hence a greater number of possible retrieval cues can be activated. Studies in context reinstatement demonstrate this. This is where i have issues with ‘forgetting our name’. This data has been encoded so so well, and so richly, that i do not believe we can actively and genuinely forget because someone tells us to. Instead we just conform to meet expectations and decieve ourselves.

To sum up this long, confusing comment. I think that amnesia in hypnosis is actually down to two processes. One is unconscious self-deception ( choosing not to remember for various influential reasons). The other is simply not receiving the correct retrieval cue to access the memory, perhaps because there is no need to in the given situation or because distraction or confusion techniques are being employed. I am not convinced that it is the same kind of amnesia that we experience in every day life.

I wrote this quickly, sorry if its confusing. Im trying to make you forget your name. 🙂