Psychodynamic Forgetting (was: Re: "Bad" Mothers: The Politics ofBlame Re: Radio Doug

Carrol Cox cbcox at ilstu.edu
Tue Apr 1 10:24:08 PST 2003


loupaulsen at attbi.com wrote:
>
> The other side of this: even if such 'forgetting' is due to software rather
> than hardware (to the extent that this distinction makes sense), it seems to
> me there are a lot of ways to explain it other than the 'psychodynamic' ways.
> Just operant conditioning would do it, wouldn't it? - thinking about X causes
> distress, you avoid doing things that cause you distress, so you think about X
> less. This accounts for a hell of a lot of my own procrastination and
> avoidance behavior, I can tell you. You can call that "crude protection of
> the individual", but so is not touching hot stoves.

One way to define depression is "obsessive introspection and remembering." I would suspect that the best treatment for depression would be memory suppression, whether by medication or therapy. What one remembers while depressed is not worth remembering, but it constitutes the depression.

Carrol



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