Essay Examples on Wood Tobe-Coburn School

Memories retrieved through hypnosis

Memories retrieved through hypnosis cannot justifiably be used to prosecute someone without other evidence Traumatic experiences from a person's past are often repressed for years and even decades Hypnosis is then used to allegedly retrieve these repressed memories inclining many people to persecute others who caused the trauma within these memories However whether these memories are accurate has created controversy for decades and still science has not been able to differentiate between the two Therefore action has been undertaken within courts prohibiting retrieved memories to be used as evidence when there was no sign of prior memory as they found the testimony to be unreliable and therefore inadmissible This is largely due to how influential and impressionable memories are The unreliability of the retrieved memories is one of the main reasons they should not be used to testify against someone in court All experts agree that memories retrieved under hypnosis are often contaminated mixtures of fantasy and truth or even outright confabulations the psychologists term for illusory memories In some cases the memories retrieved may in fact be real however according to the American Psychological Association it's impossible to distinguish repressed memories from false ones without substantiating evidence The uprise in retrieved memories resulted in a challenging and controversial issue for courts worldwide when witness testimonies of recovered repressed memories regarding alleged childhood sexual abuse and violence arose 



2 pages | 456 words
Save