Dissociative Amnesia
Dissociative amnesia is a psychological condition characterized by memory loss that is not due to a neurological disorder. It is often linked to a traumatic or stressful event, and the memory loss can be selective, affecting specific details or entire periods of time. Individuals with dissociative amnesia may experience gaps in their memory and have difficulty recalling personal information.
7 Key excerpts on "Dissociative Amnesia"
eBook - ePub- V. Zepinic(Author)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- Austin Macauley Publishers(Publisher)
...It is pointed that amnesia is usually centred on traumatic events and that the extent and completeness often vary from day to day, but there is a persistent common core that cannot be recalled in the waking state. For the diagnostic purposes, it requires that (a) amnesia, either partial or complete, for recent events that are of a traumatic or stressful nature and (b) absence of organic brain disorders, intoxication, or excessive fatigue. It is evidenced that traumatic experience plays a key role in development of symptoms of amnesia if organic brain disorders are excluded. The symptoms of amnesia often cause clinically significant distress in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning (APA, 2013). Most often the missing personal information involves the individual’s identity and may include name, age, occupational information, marital status and the personal life history (Rapaport, 1971). Dissociative Amnesia most commonly presents as a retrospectively reported missing part or parts in recall for aspects of the individual’s life history and experience. These gaps are usually related to the traumatic or extremely stressful events and these forms more likely to occur during wartime or in response to a natural disaster or other forms of severe trauma (APA, 2013). Dissociative Amnesia should be considered as a part of structural dissociation in which information is available to one-part bit not to another part of personality. Some clinicians such as Putnam (1992), Dell et al., (2009), Pelcovitz et al., (1977) stated that the Dissociative Amnesia is characteristic of the survivors of childhood abuse and neglect, or a part of the complex PTSD. Theoretical understanding of the Dissociative Amnesia can be developed by evaluating what is happening with one’s memory recall after amnesic state is over...
- Amy E. Wenzel(Author)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- SAGE Publications, Inc(Publisher)
...Rudy Nydegger Rudy Nydegger Nydegger, Rudy Dissociative Amnesia Dissociative Amnesia 1133 1134 Dissociative Amnesia Dissociative disorders are psychological disturbances that affect the organization of identity, memory, perception, and/or consciousness in individuals. As originally described by French psychopathologist Pierre Janet in the late 1800s and early 1900s, dissociation may be best understood as a disorganization of mental processes when events that are normally linked logically and temporally are isolated from other mental processes that would normally be working together. The study of these phenomena led to Sigmund Freud’s theory of the subconscious and Janet’s theory of dissociation, and these models are still used today to explain dissociative phenomena. The term dissociative disorder was introduced in 1980 when the third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-III) abandoned the term hysteria in favor of separate categories for somatoform and dissociative disorders. This entry describes and discusses Dissociative Amnesia (DA), which involves significant memory loss that is more extensive than simple forgetfulness and cannot be explained by a physical or neurological condition, as it relates to abnormal and clinical psychology. The most common type of DA is when someone loses memory of traumatic events and periods of time surrounding these events, especially events linked to childhood trauma. DA is a classic, functional disorder of episodic memory (remembering events that happen to oneself) and does not involve procedural memory (remembering how one does things) or problems with memory storage; unlike disorders such as dementia, it is reversible. The three main characteristics of DA are as follows: Memory loss is episodic (first-person things or events that happen to oneself). Memory loss is for one or more discrete time periods, ranging from minutes to years, and involves a complete loss of memories...
- (Author)
- 2020(Publication Date)
- Wiley(Publisher)
...Dissociative Disorders Steven Jay Lynn 1, Craig P. Polizzi 1, and Scott O. Lilienfeld 2 1 Binghamton University 2 Emory University and University of Melbourne Dissociative disorders have sparked debate for more than a century. Nevertheless, researchers have made substantial strides in determining their nature and potential antecedents, and theorists have proposed promising but competing accounts of their etiology. Dissociative Disorders and Dissociative Experiences Dissociative disorders are marked by discontinuities in the “normal integration of consciousness, memory, identity, emotion, perception, body representation, motor control, and behavior” (American Psychiatric Association, 2013, p. 291). Yet people with a dissociative disorder often vary in more ways than they share a uniform symptom profile. Some experience radical alterations in their sense of self and their surroundings, others experience difficulties in their recall of events, and still others experience profound alterations in their sense of identity and abrupt changes in emotions. The DSM‐V provides the following guidelines for diagnosing the three major dissociative disorders: Dissociative Amnesia is diagnosed in the presence of an inability to recall important autobiographical information, typically of a traumatic or stressful nature, that is inconsistent with ordinary forgetting. This disorder typically “consists of localized or selective amnesia for a specific event or events, or generalized amnesia for identity and life history” (American Psychiatric Association, 2013, p. 298). Depersonalization/derealization disorder, formerly known as depersonalization disorder, is diagnosed based on persistent depersonalization, derealization, or both...
eBook - ePubAn Introduction to Cognitive Psychology
Processes and Disorders
- David Groome(Author)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...chapter 7 Disorders of memory David Groome DOI: 10.4324/9781351020862-7 Contents 7.1 Amnesia and its causes 7.2 Anterograde and retrograde amnesia 7.3 Intact and impaired memory systems 7.4 Theories of amnesia 7.5 Other types of memory disorder 7.6 Rehabilitation Summary Further reading 7.1 Amnesia and its causes Amnesia is the name given to disorders of memory. Amnesia normally involves severe forgetfulness which goes beyond the everyday forgetting observed in normal people, to the extent that it may interfere with the activities of normal life. We are all prone to moments of forgetfulness, but most people with intact cognitive functioning can remember quite a lot about their lives, especially their most recent experiences and events which are important to them. However, a person suffering from amnesia may be quite unable to remember any recent events. Without an intact memory it can become impossible to keep a job, to keep up relationships with family and friends, or even to look after oneself and maintain an independent existence. In fact it is clear from the study of severely amnesic patients that memory is quite crucial to our ability to function properly as human beings. Amnesia is a very disabling condition, but it is also a disorder from which a great deal can be learned about the nature of memory function. Causes of amnesia Amnesia may arise from a number of different causes (also known as ‘aetiologies’), which can be divided into two main groups, the organic amnesias and the psychogenic amnesias. Amnesia A pathological impairment of memory function. Organic amnesia An impairment of memory function caused by physical damage to the brain. Organic amnesias are caused by some form of physical damage (known as a lesion) inflicted on the brain. This may arise from a variety of different causes, including brain infections, strokes, head injuries, and degenerative disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease...
eBook - ePub- Alan Baddeley, Michael W. Eysenck, Michael C. Anderson(Authors)
- 2020(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Hence understanding its nature is important if the patient is to be helped. Attempts to explain the amnesic syndrome can operate at two separate but related levels. One of these concerns the psychological functions that are disturbed, while the other concerns their neurobiological underpinnings. We will begin with explanations of amnesia at the psychological level, moving on later to the role of neurobiology. The 2001 film Memento chronicles the story of Leonard, an ex-insurance investigator who can no longer build new memories, as he attempts to find the perpetrator of a violent attack which caused his post-traumatic anterograde amnesia and left his wife dead. The attack is the last event he can recall. Early hypotheses included greater susceptibility to interference leading to a retrieval deficit (Warrington & Weiskrantz, 1970), faster forgetting (Huppert & Piercy, 1979) and an incapacity for deep processing (Cermak, Butters, & Moreines, 1974), although all of these subsequently ran into problems (see Baddeley, 1990, ch. 16 for a discussion). It is, however, too soon to reject the possibility that faster forgetting, and/or susceptibility to interference may play a part in some patients, possibly reflecting further additional deficits. However, whatever the precise mechanism, it seems likely that amnesia disrupts the capacity to associate a specific event or episode with its context, its location in time and place and that this allows individual specific memories to be retrieved. In a study using rats, Winocur and Mills (1970) observed that animals with hippocampal lesions were particularly bad at making use of environmental context in a spatial learning task, suggesting to Winocur (1978) that a failure to associate memories with context may also apply to human amnesic patients...
eBook - ePubHuman Memory
Structures and Images
- Mary B. Howes(Author)
- 2006(Publication Date)
- SAGE Publications, Inc(Publisher)
...CHAPTER 15 Disorders of Memory Overview 1. In the amnesic syndrome, individuals are unable to form new episodic memories and, typically, forget much of the past. Established semantic memory is generally not impaired in the amnesic syndrome. The acquiring of new semantic knowledge may or may not be impaired. Short-term, procedural, and implicit memory generally functions at a normal or close to normal level. 2. Damage to the frontal lobes typically results in confabulation: a confusion of imagined information with real memories. The imagined information can be quite unrealistic. Ability to recall order and temporal information is also impaired. 3. Amnesia can involve the selective loss of certain kinds of information. Some individuals may lose concepts of living but not of nonliving things, or vice versa, and others may recall public but not personal events and vice versa. Even more selective amnesias also exist. 4. Dementia is a condition in which memory deteriorates, and there is also loss of rational thought. It is caused by a range of diseases and can also occur due to aging. Alzheimer’s disease is a severe form of dementia in which memory, conceptual representation, language, and reasoning are progressively lost. Learning Objectives 1. Knowledge of the amnesic syndrome. Knowledge of amnesia caused by medial temporal lobe (MTL) and by diencephalic damage. Knowledge of the functions that are spared. Knowledge of the fact that different classes of concept can be lost selectively from memory. 2. Knowledge of the effects of damage to the frontal lobes. 3...
eBook - ePubTrauma and Its Impacts on Temporal Experience
New Perspectives from Phenomenology and Psychoanalysis
- Selene Mezzalira(Author)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Chapter 5 Dissociation and Traumatic Temporality DOI: 10.4324/9781003230601-6 This chapter deals primarily with dissociation, that is, the disruption of the ordinary integration of consciousness and memory. In traumatized individuals, autobiographical memories show specific types of disruption, and can produce traumatic flashbacks, namely, memory fragments encoded in more primitive brain regions than the ones subserving the storage of ordinary autobiographical memories. Experiencing flashbacks amounts to “reliving” the traumatic event, rather than just “remembering” it. The so-called “speechless terror,” which goes hand in hand with the inhibition of Broca’s area, hinders the subject’s capacity to use verbal language to communicate, thus impairing the encoding of conscious semantic memory. Dissociating amounts to “losing time,” and involves a disruption of a coherent sense of self in time. Ultimately, trauma seems to suspend time sense by producing temporal fragmentation, which seems to reinstate or preserve a sense of agency over the traumatic episode. The Origin of Dissociation The term “dissociation” derives from a translation by William James (1842–1910) of the term désagrégation, first proposed by Janet ([1889] 2005) in the context of his studies on hysteria (see James, [1890] 1950). The word has been used for decades only with regard to the fragmentation pertaining to psychotic experiences. Originally, however, it referred to the concept of the human mind as naturally fragmented, such that the sense of a unified Self would be the result of a synthetic activity of the mind (Lapassade, 1996). The so-called Janetian “traumatic model” predicted that the individual’s sense of unity in time is altered when faced with traumatic experiences, which produce dissociated mental states (Nemiah, 1998)...
