Vets Who Repress Traumatic Memories May Not Be Worse Off

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Dr. Matthew J. Friedman, executive director of the department of Veterans Affairs National Center for PTSD, took a cautious view of the findings.

"Over the last 10 to 15 years, we've found how complex memory really is," he said. "And I don't think that there is any longer a widely held belief in the classic psychoanalytic theory that suggests that somehow if you suppress your stress and angst that the distress will manifest itself in negative symptoms."

"Certainly, difficulty in retrieving memories can be adaptive and promote good health and longer life in some cases, and can be maladaptive in others," noted Friedman, who is also a professor in Dartmouth Medical School's department of psychiatry and department of pharmacology and toxicology. "But this paper suffers from a lack of conceptual clarity. The notion of 'repression' connotes different things to different people. The concept is fuzzy. So the authors should be commended for opening up a very interesting line of inquiry. But at the same time I think we need to be very, very careful about how we interpret these results."

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More information

For more on PTSD, visit the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.

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