Dissociative amnesia

Dissociative amnesia or psychogenic amnesia is a dissociative disorder characterized by retrospectively reported memory gaps. These gaps involve an inability to recall personal information, usually of a traumatic or stressful nature. The concept is scientifically controversial and remains disputed.

Dissociative amnesia was previously known as psychogenic amnesia, a memory disorder, which was characterized by sudden retrograde episodic memory loss, said to occur for a period of time ranging from hours to years to decades.

The atypical clinical syndrome of the memory disorder (as opposed to organic amnesia) is that a person with dissociative amnesia is profoundly unable to remember personal information about themselves; there is a lack of conscious self-knowledge which affects even simple self-knowledge, such as who they are. Dissociative amnesia is distinguished from organic amnesia in that it is supposed to result from a nonorganic cause: no structural brain damage should be evident but some form of psychological stress should precipitate the amnesia. Dissociative amnesia as a memory disorder is controversial.

Definition

Dissociative amnesia is the presence of retrograde amnesia (the inability to retrieve stored memories leading up to the onset of amnesia), and an absence of anterograde amnesia (the inability to form new long-term memories). Access to episodic memory can be impeded, while the degree of impairment to short term memory, semantic memory and procedural memory is thought to vary among cases. If other memory processes are affected, they are usually much less severely affected than retrograde autobiographical memory, which is taken as the hallmark of dissociative amnesia.